Netflix, Amazon, Paramount, Mattel, Hasbro, and a Swedish broadcaster most American executives have never heard of have all already made this same bet, in different sizes and with different conviction. NBCUniversal isn’t pioneering anything. It’s catching up to a decision the rest of the industry made years ago, and the split from Comcast is exactly the clean break that makes catching up possible.

Why the Timing Is Actually Perfect

Comcast announced the split on June 29, separating its cable, wireless, and broadband business from a standalone NBCUniversal that keeps Universal Pictures, NBC and Telemundo, NBC News, Peacock, Bravo, the theme parks, and Sky. Mike Cavanagh takes over as CEO. The deal requires regulatory approval and is expected to close in about a year.

That structure matters more than it sounds. For two decades, NBCUniversal’s capital allocation competed against Comcast’s cable and broadband priorities, businesses that are large, profitable, and structurally in decline. Every dollar it wanted for a bold content or platform bet had to be justified against that far larger, more predictable cash machine. Once the split closes, that competition disappears, and NBCUniversal has to define its own growth story. Gaming is one of the only entertainment categories still growing at double digits.

This Isn’t a New Idea. It’s an Overdue One

Here’s the part most coverage missed. This isn’t Comcast’s first flirtation with gaming. CEO Brian Roberts previously explored acquiring both Activision and Electronic Arts, and considered an equity stake in Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite. None of those deals happened, though his son, Tucker Roberts, now runs Comcast’s gaming division and is reportedly eager to push further in.

That history reframes the story. This is an organization that wanted in for years, got outmaneuvered or lost its nerve each time, and is now getting a cleaner structure and a fresh mandate to finally act.

Every Legacy Media and Toy Company Already Made This Bet

NBCUniversal would be entering a race already well underway, and the results so far favor the companies that moved early.

Netflix made the loudest move in industry history in December 2025, agreeing to acquire Warner Bros. for a total enterprise value of $82.7 billion following Warner Bros. Discovery’s separation of its Discovery Global networks business. The deal was primarily a film and television play, built around HBO and a century of Warner Bros. storytelling IP. But it’s also the clearest evidence yet that the largest streaming company in the world sees content ownership at this scale as the only way to keep growing. Netflix’s own game division, built since 2021 through acquisitions like Night School Studio and Boss Fight Entertainment, has been a smaller, quieter version of the same instinct.

Amazon took the opposite path, and it’s been messier. Amazon bought Twitch for roughly $970 million in 2014 and poured billions into internal development since, but 2025 brought major layoffs and the end of active development on New World, its flagship MMO, as the company pivots toward its Luna cloud gaming platform. Scale and capital alone don’t guarantee gaming success. Execution and focus do.

Paramount has been the most disciplined recent mover. The newly formed Paramount Games Studio combines Skydance Interactive, Skydance New Media, and Paramount’s licensing business under one roof, built on the belief that games are, as EVP Dan Prigg put it, “the deepest level of engagement for fans.” I covered Paramount’s structure-follows-strategy approach here, and it’s the template NBCUniversal should study: build a real studio structure from day one instead of bolting gaming onto the org chart as an afterthought.

The toy industry got here first. Mattel bought out NetEase’s stake in its mobile gaming joint venture for $159 million earlier this year to take full control of a business now central to its transformation into an IP management company. Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division generated over $1 billion in operating profit in 2025 at a 46% margin, nearly ten times the profit of the entire legacy toy business, the single clearest data point in this piece for why content owners should be paying attention.

Then there’s Modern Times Group, a Swedish broadcaster that spent the last decade doing exactly what NBCUniversal is reportedly now considering: buying its way into gaming, one studio at a time. MTG acquired Kongregate, InnoGames, Hutch, Ninja Kiwi, and Plarium, and is now organized around two gaming divisions that generate the bulk of its business. Nobody outside the industry has heard of MTG. That’s the point. It became a gaming company through a string of mid-sized, unglamorous acquisitions rather than waiting for one perfect deal, a legitimate blueprint for a portfolio strategy over a single trophy purchase.

None of these companies moved because gaming was trendy. They moved because gaming is where the engagement, margins, and audience relationships already are, and every year a legacy media company waits is a year a platform holder like Roblox or Fortnite captures that relationship instead.

The Shopping List: Who NBCUniversal Should Actually Call

If NBCUniversal really goes shopping, who’s on the list? Some obvious names turn out to be structurally impossible to buy. A couple of unexpected ones might be exactly right. Here are the six I’d put in front of Cavanagh, including one that has nothing to do with making games.

Roblox

The single best strategic fit and the hardest deal to close. Roblox is where Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z already spend their time, and NBCUniversal’s core broadcast and cable audience skews older every year. But CEO David Baszucki controls the company through a dual-class structure giving him roughly 20 times the voting power of an average shareholder on a stake worth only about 7% of the economics.
Why it can happen: at a $38 billion market cap it’s expensive but not unaffordable, and Baszucki has shown he’ll sell smaller Roblox-native studios when the price is right.
Why it won’t: nobody acquires a company against the will of a founder with effective board control, and there’s no sign Baszucki wants out.

Ubisoft

A genuinely distressed AAA publisher with a portfolio built for cross-media exploitation: Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow Six, Far Cry, all franchises with obvious film and TV extensions. Tencent already paid roughly €1.16 billion for a 26% stake in Vantage Studios, the subsidiary housing those three franchises, at a €3.8 billion valuation, proving the appetite and price floor already exist.
Why it can happen: the company has been distressed enough to sell down a piece of its crown jewels once already this year, and the Guillemot family’s grip has weakened.
Why it won’t: the French government treats Ubisoft as a national champion and has quietly discouraged past foreign takeovers, and an American buyer would draw exactly that scrutiny.

Epic Games

The Fortnite ecosystem is arguably the closest thing gaming has to its own cross-media universe already, complete with concerts, movie tie-ins, and a creator economy that rivals YouTube’s.
Why it can happen: Tencent’s 40% stake is non-controlling, Comcast itself previously explored an equity position, and a strategic investment short of full acquisition is a realistic starting point.
Why it won’t: Tim Sweeney has said repeatedly he intends to keep control of Epic and has never taken it public by choice, and a buyer looking for operational control runs straight into that wall.

A portfolio of smaller studios

Rather than chase one marquee name, NBCUniversal could do what Modern Times Group did: acquire a handful of mid-sized, profitable studios and scale them with distribution and IP a standalone studio could never access. Companies like Hidden Door, which builds AI-driven narrative games, or Highrise, the social avatar platform, get bought for tens of millions rather than billions and can be folded in without betting the balance sheet.
Why it can happen: it’s the lowest-risk, most capital-efficient path in, and Roblox-native studios already change hands regularly.
Why it won’t: it’s slow and unglamorous, and doesn’t hand a board the single visible headline it wants.

Take-Two Interactive

The most financially realistic marquee deal here, and the one with the worst timing. Take-Two has no founder or family stake standing in the way. CEO Strauss Zelnick has said outright that as a public company, any credible offer has to be considered, and its GTA, NBA 2K, Red Dead Redemption, and Borderlands portfolio is exactly the prestige IP a media company would want.
Why it can happen: unlike Roblox, Epic, or Ubisoft, no single shareholder or government can block a deal, and Take-Two’s board has engaged before when the price is right.
Why it won’t: the company sits at roughly a $44 billion market cap heading into Grand Theft Auto VI, arguably the most anticipated release of the decade, meaning NBCUniversal would be buying right before the number gets bigger.

Discord

The non-obvious pick, and the one I think matters most. Discord isn’t a game studio. It’s the community and identity layer sitting underneath gaming, esports, and fandom broadly, with over 200 million monthly active users. It walked away from a reported $12 billion acquisition offer from Microsoft in 2021, bet on going public instead, and filed confidentially for an IPO this year that has since stalled, with secondary valuations now below the number it turned down. NBCUniversal’s real gap isn’t content. It’s a persistent community layer around Peacock, Bravo, and its biggest fandoms, exactly what Discord already does for gaming communities.
Why it can happen: a company that turned down a buyer is now watching its own IPO underperform that offer, the exact condition that reopens acquisition talk.
Why it won’t: reversing course after a stalled IPO reads to the market as an admission of failure, a hard needle for any management team to thread.

The Real Bet

None of this is guaranteed to happen the way I’ve laid it out. Deals this size take years, egos get in the way, and regulators have opinions of their own. But the direction is no longer in question. Six very different companies reached the same conclusion from different starting points: owning a real position in gaming isn’t optional anymore for a company that depends on audience attention to survive.

NBCUniversal spent two decades sharing a balance sheet with a cable business that had no reason to fund this bet. That excuse is gone in about a year. The only question is whether Cavanagh moves fast enough to buy in before the good targets are gone, or ends up explaining years from now why the company waited too long, the same way Comcast once did.

What do you think? Which of these six would actually move the needle for NBCUniversal, and did I miss the right target? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is a weekly briefing on how gaming, technology, and entertainment are reshaping brand strategy for decision-makers at the world’s biggest brands. If this resonated, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

"I hope they at least remove the Prancing Horse from that car."

Luca di Montezemolo, former CEO of Ferrari, didn’t mince words when the luxury brand revealed its $640,000 electric vehicle, the Ferrari Luce. He bit his tongue to avoid doing Ferrari more damage than his comment already might. He later apologized, calling it a massive risk of destroying a myth.

Social media didn’t hold back either. Between a car that “looks like it was designed entirely in airplane mode” and “an Apple Store made a minivan and gave it trust issues,” the internet’s reaction matched the market’s. Ferrari shed nearly 8% of its stock price the trading day after the reveal, and the stock remains down roughly 23% over the past 12 months.

In its search for redemption, Ferrari may have found an unlikely ally: mobile games. A few days ago, the brand with the infamous prancing horse announced a partnership with the equally infamous, at least inside the gaming industry, mobile game PUBG Mobile. For the next eight weeks, players get to drive four of Ferrari’s most mythical cars inside one of the most popular and longest-running games on the planet. A little less than a week into launch, early reception suggests Ferrari has found its way back, and left the Luce behind as a Jony Ive-induced fever dream.

Why Mobile Games Are the Reach Play Most Brands Still Miss

Every brand executive I talk to has a media plan built around CTV, social, and increasingly retail media. Almost none of them have a real line item for mobile gaming, and that gap is becoming one of the most expensive blind spots in marketing.

The numbers explain why it shouldn’t be. 54.4% of the US population will be a mobile phone gamer in 2026, according to a new study from EMARKETER and Admazing surveying 108 US marketers. Nearly 9 in 10 marketers are at least slightly confident mobile gaming can reach their target audience, and a third are very or extremely confident their desired demographic plays mobile games.

Yet only 10.2% of marketers say their organizations regularly use mobile gaming for brand campaigns. Over a third neither use it nor actively consider it at all. The reasons are familiar to anyone who has sat through a media planning meeting: a lingering assumption that gamers resent advertising, and, historically, weak measurement. “There was a feeling that gamers would find advertising distracting and react negatively to advertising,” said Yory Wurmser, principal analyst at EMARKETER. “Secondly, the measurement was really kind of poor. That was a huge problem.”

That gap is closing fast. The IAB released its Gaming Measurement Framework last year specifically to help marketers benchmark in-game ads, rewarded ads, and interstitials. Kantar’s Pedro Sánchez López puts real numbers behind the shift: mobile gaming ad campaigns deliver purchase intent 3.5 times stronger than the US norm, a 7.1 percentage point lift, and consumer receptivity to gaming ads has climbed from 25% in 2012 to 54% in 2025. Separately, Bain & Company found 46% of game players regularly make in-game purchases triggered by in-game ads, up from 40% a year earlier. Don’t get me wrong. There’s still a ton of work to do here. But things are headed in the right direction.

In case you missed it: relevant post previously released

This is precisely the environment PUBG Mobile brings to the table for Ferrari. The game has racked up roughly 1.75 billion downloads and more than $15 billion in lifetime revenue since its 2018 launch, with upward of 90 million people playing daily across its regional versions. That’s a reach number most CTV buys can’t touch, inside an environment where 86.1% of marketers say attention quality, meaning whether the audience is actively engaged rather than passively exposed, is at least moderately important to them.

That reach is also wealthier than most marketers assume. GWI data shows PUBG Mobile regulars are 21% more likely to be high net worth individuals than the average consumer. The tired assumption that mobile gamers have no real discretionary income doesn’t hold up here, and it’s exactly the audience quality a car with the price tage and prestige of a Ferrari needs.

Inside the Collaboration

The “PUBG Mobile x Scuderia Ferrari HP” collaboration runs from July 10 through September 8, 2026, introducing four Ferrari models built around genuinely different identities: the Roma (style), the Purosangue (utility), the flagship hybrid hypercar LaFerrari (innovation), and the SF90 XX Spider (Ferrari’s racing technology built for the road). Each comes in exclusive colorways, and players can further personalize their cars through original rims, exclusive decals, and brake calipers in official Ferrari colors, alongside themed items like a Ferrari parachute, backpack, and ornament.

The centerpiece is an in-game exhibition of the actual 2025 Scuderia Ferrari HP Formula 1 car. Interacting with display stands scattered across the map triggers an immersive viewing sequence, and players can take in-game photos with the car to share beyond standard gameplay.

This isn’t PUBG Mobile’s first rodeo with automotive brands. The collaboration runs on the same Speed Drift structure that made an earlier Porsche partnership one of the game’s most popular crossovers. That matters because Ferrari isn’t testing an unproven format. It’s stepping into a playbook that already works, and early player response is already calling this one of the most anticipated collaborations of the year.

The early numbers back that up. According to Mana Partners, PUBG Mobile’s UC whales, the game’s highest-spending players, show a 68% adjacency overlap with mentions of the LaFerrari and SF90 XX Spider specifically, the two models built around innovation and racing pedigree, largely driven by the Speed Drift event tied to the launch. Mentions of the collaboration accelerated 245% over the first seven days, and cross-engagement between Tencent Games and Ferrari’s own follower base rose 31%. Ferrari reached the exact players most likely to spend, on the exact cars built to carry its halo, and pulled some of its own audience into the game’s orbit along the way.

What Elaris’ Audience Data Says About Ferrari’s Bet

I ran PUBG Mobile’s audience through Elaris to see how well Ferrari’s specific execution fits the player base, not just the game’s overall scale. The short version: directionally strong, with real gaps worth naming.

Where it fits

Ferrari sells status, performance, and dominance, and PUBG Mobile’s audience over-indexes hard on exactly that: very high power (89th percentile), control (84th percentile), and drive to be the best (81st percentile). A Ferrari skin reads as an instant status signal in lobby and in match. The audience also scores very high on teamwork (91st percentile), so matching squad liveries work as coordinated flex without requiring deep community bonding. And PUBG players skew high on “sensor” traits, meaning they respond to tangible, verifiable specifics rather than abstract brand feeling, exactly what real model names, rims, decals, and brake calipers deliver.

Where the risk sits

The largest single segment of the audience is also highly skeptical of brand promises, low on social well-being, and allergic to anything that reads as bought prestige instead of earned prestige. That segment wants to know exactly how to get an item, how long it takes, and what it includes, not to be sold on the legend of Ferrari. If the best cosmetics sit mostly behind spend rather than skill, this segment reads the whole partnership as pay-to-win status, cutting against the very “being the best” value that made Ferrari appealing to them in the first place.

What Ferrari got right

Splitting four cars into four distinct identities is smart segmentation without ever saying “this is for you.” The customization system, granular and visible, plays directly into the audience’s high control and high sensor preferences. And the F1 car exhibition creates a genuine shareable moment for the portion of the audience that already enjoys social proof, without forcing the whole collaboration to lean on social behavior the largest segment doesn’t actually want.

What’s still missing

The exhibition is closer to a museum piece than a competitive advantage, and a skeptical audience will ask what it does for them in a match, not just how it looks. There’s also a thematic gap: PUBG Mobile is gritty, tactical, and survival-driven, and the Roma’s “timeless elegance” framing can feel like a showroom dropped into a battlefield unless it’s grounded in something mechanical, like handling, sound, or a genuine chase-and-escape fantasy.

The fix is available and relatively cheap: pair the paid path with a transparent, skill-based unlock track, something like winning vehicle chases or landing precision drifts, so at least one model or signature part is earned, not bought. That single addition would convert Ferrari from a brand renting attention to a brand players actually respect.

From Brand Destruction to Brand Redemption

Two months ago, Ferrari’s own executives were fielding questions about whether the Luce had damaged decades of brand equity in a single unveiling. Today, Ferrari is trending for a completely different reason, inside a game most boardrooms have never seriously discussed as a media channel.

Mobile gaming didn’t fix Ferrari’s EV problem. It never could, and it wasn’t trying to. What it proved is that when a legacy brand needs to remind a skeptical audience why it still matters, the fastest, cheapest, most attention-rich place to do that might not be a keynote stage or a Super Bowl spot. It might be a battle royale map with 90 million people logging in today alone.

What do you think? Is your brand still treating mobile gaming as an afterthought, or is this the year that changes? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is a weekly briefing on how gaming, technology, and entertainment are reshaping brand strategy for decision-makers at the world’s biggest brands. If this resonated, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

One of the best conversations I had at Cannes Lions this year was with Jonathan Stringfield, Microsoft’s Head of Measurement Science. He has spent his entire career at the intersection of gaming and advertising, and he does not sugarcoat what he sees:

His words, not mine. But I agree with his diagnosis of gaming’s advertising problem.

What he meant was specific. Games still can’t tell a brand, with any consistency, what it gets back for every dollar spent on a gaming activation, whether that’s a branded experience, an in-game ad buy, or something in between. That math has been solved and repeatable on social media for over a decade. In gaming, it remains a live debate at every conference I attend.

Put yourself in the shoes of the brand marketer and media buyer tasked with allocating $1 billion in ad spend over the next 12 months and maximizing predictable returns. The thought experiment makes it obvious why gaming still sits much lower on the depth chart of a brand marketer’s media channels of choice.

Stringfield’s sharper point, the one that stuck with me, is that gaming keeps trying to win an argument it was never built to win. Platforms keep leading brand pitches with reach, a metric gaming will always lose to social media by definition, instead of building the measurement standard around what only gaming can deliver: deep, active engagement.

The Reach Fight Gaming Can’t Win

Look at the numbers, and Stringfield’s point becomes obvious fast.

Roblox is the largest single gaming experience in the world right now. In its first-quarter 2026 shareholder letter, the company reported average daily active users of 132 million, up 35% year over year, an outstanding growth rate for a platform its size.

Now put that next to Snapchat, a social app (and not a hardware company - c’mon Evan!) that trails Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok and doesn’t crack the top five social networks globally. In its own first-quarter 2026 results, Snap reported 483 million daily active users and 956 million monthly active users. A social platform outside the top five still reaches roughly three times more people daily, and close to seven times more people monthly, than the single largest experience gaming has to offer.

That is the fight gaming keeps signing up for every time a platform leads a brand pitch with monthly actives or impressions. The audience gaming holds is enormously valuable. Reach was simply never gaming’s strength. Engagement is.

Where Gaming Actually Wins

The attention numbers gaming does own are extraordinary. The Entertainment Software Association’s 2026 Essential Facts report counts 212.3 million weekly US players, with 71% of Millennials, ages 30 to 45, and 56% of Gen X, ages 45 to 61, playing every week. That’s the 25-49 demographic advertisers pay the most to reach, engaged inside games at a higher weekly rate than most brands see on their own owned channels. Newzoo puts the 25-44 age band at roughly 40% of the global player base. McKinsey finds PC and console players report 76% receptivity to in-game advertising, nearly matching mobile’s 83%.

That’s a story about depth of engagement: fewer total users than the biggest social apps, but far more time, attention, and repeat behavior per user than a scroll-based feed will ever produce. That is the metric gaming should be measuring itself against, and largely isn’t yet.

The First Cracks in the Old Model

Some of the pieces of Stringfield’s fix are already showing up individually.

Roblox rebuilt its recommendation algorithm this year to weigh 28 days of player behavior, daily return rate and total session time, instead of the 7-day, click-driven signal it used before. Chief Growth Officer John Ciancutti was explicit about the intent: surface games players stick with, not games that win a quick click and lose the player by day two.

Epic Games has paid out more than $1 billion to Fortnite creators since 2023 through Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and the model behind those payouts is instructive. Epic splits a pool equal to 40% of net Item Shop revenue based on each island’s share of total player hours, not its share of impressions or installs. Creator-built islands now account for 47% of all time spent in Fortnite, up from 38% a year ago, because the payout structure rewards depth of play over traffic.

EA and Xbox both had a presence at Cannes this year making a related bet: that the inventory itself needs to scale before the measurement conversation can mature. In June, EA launched EA Advertising, a platform that places brands directly into live gameplay across its portfolio, from stadium signage in Madden NFL to custom content inside EA Sports FC, with Visa, Red Bull, Xfinity, Lowe’s, Peacock, and Mountain Dew signed on as launch partners reaching a combined 120 million monthly players. Around the same time, Xbox’s new Chief Strategy Officer, Matthew Ball, started publicly floating ad-supported tiers as a way to keep games affordable against rising development and hardware costs, the same model Netflix and Disney+ already run on mature, third-party-audited measurement. Both moves add real inventory and real intent at the platform level. Neither comes bundled with the shared measurement standard Stringfield is asking for.

Kantar’s data shows what happens when engagement-native measurement gets applied to advertising itself: mobile gaming campaigns deliver purchase intent 3.5 times stronger than the US norm, and consumer receptivity to gaming ads has climbed from 25% in 2012 to 54% last year. The IAB’s Gaming Measurement Framework, released in June 2025, was a real step toward standardizing this, layering brand lift, attention, and sales uplift metrics on top of the old reach-based baseline.

These are individual publishers and standards bodies solving pieces of the same problem on their own timelines. What’s still missing is the thing Stringfield says actually opens the floodgates.

One Standard, Not Fifty

Here’s where Stringfield landed, and I think he’s right. It will take the major game developers and publishers coming together to jointly define the metrics standard suited to what games uniquely deliver, align ROI and ROAS measurement against that standard, and build the transparent, consistent tooling behind it, across every game, platform, and genre. That means one shared, radically transparent standard, consistent across every publisher, that a CFO can trust the same way she trusts a Nielsen number for television.

The Podcast Precedent

To see what’s possible once a medium stops competing on the wrong metric, look at podcasts.

Podcasting crossed 550 million monthly global listeners in 2026, and global ad spend passed $5 billion, growing 12.4% year over year and still outpacing overall digital ad growth of roughly 8%. The 25-44 age band makes up 38% of listeners, the same money demo gaming already owns.

Podcasts got here by building measurement around what podcasts are actually good at: trust, retention, and completion. The IAB’s Podcast Measurement Guidelines, paired with attribution vendors like Podscribe and Claritas and brand-lift specialists like Veritonic, now produce host-read ROAS of 3.4x to 5.1x, numbers that make podcast budgets easy to defend in a boardroom. Programmatic buying and the format’s expansion into video on YouTube and Spotify added scale on top of that trust once it existed, not before.

Games offer an even deeper, more immersive version of everything that made podcast measurement work: sustained attention, habitual return behavior, and a captive audience giving the experience its full focus. Once gaming builds its own version of the podcast measurement stack, native to engagement instead of borrowed from reach, the growth curve could be steeper than podcasting’s.

Gaming Is Exactly Where Social Media Was 25 Years Ago

That’s the frame I keep coming back to. Gaming commands more attention and deeper engagement than almost any other medium, and still takes home less than 5% of the roughly $1.06 trillion in global ad spend Dentsu projects for 2026, per its Gaming Trends Report. Social media sat in a similar position two and a half decades ago: massive audiences, unproven measurement, advertisers waiting on the sidelines. It took a standardized measurement stack, not just audience growth, to unlock the dollars. Gaming is at the exact same inflection point now.

What This Means for Your Planning

If you run marketing, brand, or strategy at a consumer business, stop asking your gaming partners how many people they reach. Ask how they measure engagement, and whether that measurement would hold up against an IAB or MRC standard if you asked twice.

Push every publisher pitch to report against retention, session depth, and redemption, the metrics Roblox and Epic are already rebuilding their own platforms around, rather than settling for impressions dressed up as strategy. Where a true cross-publisher standard doesn’t exist yet, fund your own incrementality tests rather than waiting for the industry to hand you one.

Stringfield is right. The floodgates open the day gaming stops trying to out-reach social media and starts proving, consistently and transparently, what only it can deliver.

What do you think? Is your organization still benchmarking gaming against reach, or has it started asking the engagement question instead? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is a weekly briefing on how gaming, technology, and entertainment are reshaping brand strategy for decision-makers at the world’s biggest brands. If this resonated, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

The timing was almost absurd. The deal had just landed. The press was full of takes on what it means. And here was a senior Roku executive on stage, sharing data and strategic thinking that completely reframes what this acquisition is actually about.

Most analysts have gotten the story half right. The other half is sitting in the Roku Channel Store’s games section.

The Deal, Briefly

Rupert Murdoch spent billions in the 1990s and 2000s chasing what media insiders called the TV Guide of the Future, an on-screen interface that would give whoever owned it control over how consumers navigated television. He never got there. The technology moved faster than the strategy.

Now his son Lachlan has done it in one transaction.

On June 15, 2026, Fox Corporation announced a definitive agreement to acquire Roku for $160 per share, a combination of cash and Fox Class A stock, valuing the company at approximately $22 billion. Roku reaches over 100 million global streaming households, more than half of all US broadband households. According to Nielsen, the Roku Channel commands 3% of all US streaming viewership. The platform generates $4.7 billion a year in advertising and subscription revenue. Together with Fox’s free, ad-supported streaming service Tubi, the combined company becomes the third-largest television business in the United States by viewership, behind Disney and YouTube.

Lachlan Murdoch called it “a defining moment.” Investors were less enthusiastic. Fox stock dropped more than 15% on the announcement.

The strategic rationale, as laid out in the official press release and picked up by every major outlet, covers the obvious ground.

Fox secures premier real estate on living room screens, with the ability to prominently promote its premium sports content, Fox News, and paid services directly through the Roku interface. It gains a direct relationship with more than half of all US broadband households. It picks up Roku’s first-party data on user viewing habits, enabling highly targeted advertising that commands significantly higher CPMs than traditional cable metrics. And rather than relying solely on cable carriage fees, Fox now captures ad revenue and subscription cuts from every app and service accessed through a Roku device.

These are real, valuable strategic assets. They also happen to be the obvious ones.

What most analysts evaluating this deal have missed is what comes next.

The Attention Problem

At Cannes, Anna Miller was direct about the strategic challenge Roku is actively working to solve: how do you turn attention into intention?

The reach is not the problem. Roku reaches 100 million US households. People spend 25 days per month on the platform. The attention numbers are exceptional.

The problem is converting passive attention into active engagement. Someone navigating to Netflix on their Roku device is using Roku as a gateway. The session starts and ends with Roku, but the time and value in between belong to Netflix.

Here is what makes this tension so difficult to resolve through conventional means. Netflix and YouTube are too large to be displaced or disadvantaged on the platform. When Roku went public in 2017, Netflix generated roughly a third of its total viewing while paying immaterial revenue. YouTube, its most-watched app, paid nothing. The biggest names in streaming carry their own leverage, and no amount of Murdoch ownership changes that dynamic. Fox cannot out-Netflix Netflix. It cannot redesign the home screen in ways that make its content dominant at the expense of services users refuse to give up.

This is the fundamental challenge at the heart of the Roku business. And it is precisely why the gaming angle matters so much. Games are the one category where Fox and Roku can build genuine engagement that they own entirely, a parallel lane that does not require displacing Netflix or YouTube at all.

What the Channel Store Is Already Telling Roku

Here is what is not in any of the analyst reports: Roku already has a games offering. Through the Roku Channel Store’s Games section, users can download and play titles directly on their devices, including PAC-MAN, Tetris, Trivia Crack, and Wheel of Fortune.

It is early. But the data coming back is significant. A small group of Roku users plays games with high frequency, and the engagement numbers are striking. Roku’s partner Super League Gaming found that Roku users spend an average of 19 minutes in the Roku gaming channel. For context: the average consumer spends 16 minutes just trying to find something to watch on streaming. They spend more time in the gaming channel than they do looking for a show.

Talk about signal.

And Roku knows it. Gaming, Miller told the Cannes audience, is proving to be a powerful strategy for the company to increase engagement and turn passive viewing time into active participation.

The Churn Problem Gaming Solves

Here is the underlying business problem that makes this signal so important for Fox and Roku.

Approximately 20% of consumers regularly cancel streaming app subscriptions to move to a different service. When you finish the latest season of your favorite show, the calculus is simple: is there enough on this platform to justify staying, or is the next thing I want on a different service? Consumer loyalty is tied to content, not to the platform delivering it. When you have watched the latest season of House of the Dragon, you do not necessarily stick around.

This churn dynamic is a structural weakness of the streaming model. No matter how strong the content library, the moment a subscriber’s favorite series ends or a competitor drops something unmissable, the subscription is at risk.

Games change this calculus. A game does not end like a ten-episode season. The engagement loop of a well-designed game is fundamentally different from the engagement loop of a TV series. It demands active participation, it is ongoing, and it builds daily habits in ways that passive content consumption simply cannot.

For a platform like Roku, that means a user who plays games regularly has a fundamentally different relationship with the device and the service. The Roku box is no longer just a remote control for Netflix. It becomes a place they actively choose to spend time.

What Fox Brings to the Table

This is where the acquisition logic goes beyond the press release. And where the Rupert Murdoch comparison starts to break down in an important way.

Rupert imagined owning the only way to get to television. In 2026, that is not how it works. Roku competes with YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Vizio, and cable providers, all of which function as home screens in their own right. Owning Roku gives Fox a commanding position, but it is one position among several. The scale advantage matters. It is not sufficient on its own.

Fox brings a library of intellectual property that can directly accelerate Roku’s gaming strategy. Sports IP in particular. The NFL. MLB. NASCAR. The FIFA World Cup. These are properties with enormous built-in audiences and proven engagement models. Sports gaming is one of the fastest-growing segments in the entire games market.

Fox also brings Tubi, which offers an immediate content bridge. Tubi’s free, ad-supported library gives Roku a native streaming destination sitting inside its own ecosystem, reducing its dependence on third-party streamers for content value.

The gaming angle is where the real long-term upside lives. A Roku gaming experience built around Fox Sports IP, available directly on the device, without a console or a separate subscription, changes what the Roku platform is capable of delivering. It also changes the CPM conversation with advertisers. Advertisers have consistently paid a premium for engaged audiences. A user playing a sports trivia game on their living room TV is a fundamentally different advertising opportunity than a user passively watching a show.

Netflix Saw This Coming

The closest comparable in terms of executing this exact strategy is Netflix. Since 2021, Netflix has been building games as part of its subscription, initially on mobile and increasingly moving toward TV. The explicit strategic goal: retention. Netflix’s thesis is that gameplay has a measurable positive impact on subscriber retention, giving members additional reasons to open the app between seasons and building a daily habit that passive content alone cannot sustain.

Netflix’s gross churn rate sits at approximately 1.8% per month, one of the lowest in the streaming industry. The gaming strategy is one piece of that. The company has now shifted its gaming push explicitly toward TV-based interactivity, including party games using smartphones as controllers and real-time voting features for live shows, directly targeting the living room screen.

Fox and Roku, post-merger, are sitting on an opportunity to execute this playbook at a scale Netflix cannot match on its own. Roku owns the hardware relationship with more than half of all US broadband households. Fox brings the IP and the content muscle. The gaming layer is what binds those two assets into something more durable than either company could build independently.

What This Means for Brand and Marketing Leaders

The standard read on this deal focuses on scale and advertising. Bigger audience, better data, higher CPMs. Those arguments are correct and they matter.

The real opportunity for brand and marketing leaders is the engagement model shift. If Roku becomes a meaningful gaming platform, built around familiar IP and accessible mechanics on a device already in most US living rooms, the nature of the advertising inventory on that platform changes fundamentally.

Interactive ad formats tied to game mechanics, branded content that lives inside a game, and sponsorship models built around sports gaming experiences are already being tested in other contexts. The Fox and Roku combination creates the infrastructure to deliver those formats at television scale.

The brands that understand this now will have a meaningful head start over those still optimizing for pre-roll impressions on passive viewing.

The $22 billion headline number has dominated the coverage. The Games section of the Roku Channel Store is where the next chapter of this story actually begins.

What do you think? Have you seen gaming start to show up as a serious priority in your organization’s media planning? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers gaming, technology, and entertainment strategy for decision-makers at the world’s leading brands. Published weekly. Free to read.

Subscribe now

That was my number one takeaway after two days at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week. Roblox. Electronic Arts. Discord. Microsoft. Twitch. Roku. The gaming industry showed up at Cannes loud, well-funded, and with a very clear agenda.

The message from the gaming side was unambiguous: games are the marquee avenue for brands to reach and engage consumers. Full stop.

The harder question — the one that hung over every panel, every rosé-soaked beach activation, every deck full of engagement stats — is whether brands are actually ready to act on that message. Based on what I saw and heard this week, the answer is: sort of.

The Gaming Industry Came to Cannes With Intent

For years, gaming companies have had to fight for a seat at the table when it comes to advertising conversations. The dominant narrative in brand marketing has been built around social, search, and streaming. Gaming was treated as a niche: a vertical, not a platform.

Cannes 2026 felt like a turning point, at least in terms of positioning. The roster of gaming companies present at a festival historically dominated by agencies, broadcasters, and CPG brands was striking. These companies were not there to collect swag bags. They were there to sell.

Roblox has been making the rounds with brand partners for years now, but the pitch has matured significantly. EA showed up with a more muscular advertising narrative tied to its live service properties on the back of its recently announced advertising deals with Visa, Red Bull, and Peacock. Discord continues to position itself as the connective tissue between gaming communities and brand touchpoints. Microsoft, through its gaming portfolio, is an increasingly serious player in attention-based advertising (we’ll see how much veracity the rumored sales of XBOX has).

The common thread in all of these pitches: gaming commands time, attention, and community at a scale that legacy media channels are struggling to match. The average gamer spends more time in-game per week than they spend watching linear TV. That is a primary media behavior, not a niche.

Brands Are Listening. But There Is a Gap.

Here is what I also observed this week: brand leaders are getting the message, but there is still a significant disconnect between what they think gaming is and what gaming actually is.

When many CMOs and brand strategists picture a gamer, they still picture a teenager in a basement. The reality is that gaming audiences span every demographic. The fastest-growing segment of new gamers in the US over the past five years has been adults over 35. Women now represent close to half of all gamers globally. Gaming is not a subculture. It is culture.

This misunderstanding shapes how brands approach the space. They treat gaming as an awareness play at best, a stunt at worst. They talk about “entering gaming” as if it is an exotic market rather than a core consumer touchpoint. The companies I spoke with in Cannes know this perception problem exists, and they are working hard to correct it. But perception shifts take time.

The Measurement Problem Is Real, and It Is the Actual Blocker

If the perception gap is a long-term challenge, the measurement problem is the immediate one. And it came up repeatedly this week.

Any brand marketer who puts a dollar into Meta gets a confident, granular projection of what their return will be. Click-through rates, conversion data, attribution modeling — all of it packaged into dashboards that make the ROI story feel concrete and defensible.

Put that same dollar into a gaming environment, and the conversation changes completely. The return prediction becomes, as I said on LinkedIn, a dance-off between jazz hands and sticking a finger in the air.

This is not a knock on gaming. It is an honest assessment of where the industry is right now. The measurement infrastructure that advertisers rely on — the standardized metrics, the cross-platform comparability, the attribution frameworks — does not yet exist in gaming at the same level of maturity as it does in digital advertising. To add insult to injury, games keep attempting to demonstrate ROI based on the metrics that favor social media platforms. Individual games can’t match the scale of an Instagram. But games provide something social media will never be able to do - deep, active engagement. The gap persists because gaming tries to play someone else’s game.

And that gap is costing the industry real money. Not because brands do not want to invest in gaming, but because brand and finance leaders need to justify spend to boards and procurement teams. “Gamers love our activation” is not a budget line. An ROI multiple is.

This is the single biggest unlock for gaming as an advertising platform: the moment the industry rallies around a set of standardized, defensible metrics, the advertising dollars will follow at a scale that will surprise everyone.

What the Broader Cannes Conversation Tells Us

Cannes is always useful as a barometer of where the industry’s collective head is at. A few broader themes from the week that directly intersect with the gaming opportunity.

Fragmentation is accelerating, and brands know it. Consumer attention is more distributed than it has ever been. The idea that a brand can reach its entire target audience through one or two dominant channels is increasingly a legacy assumption. This fragmentation creates both a challenge and an opening for gaming — it is one of the few environments where brands can still find deep, sustained attention rather than fractional, scrolling attention. But gaming needs to make the case for itself clearly, or it will just be one more line item in an already overcrowded media plan.

Experiences matter more than messages. The phrase “the best advertising is no advertising” came up in more than one conversation I was part of this week. Consumers, particularly younger ones, have developed extraordinary tolerance for ignoring traditional ad formats. What they do not ignore is an experience that earns their time. Gaming, by definition, is an experience-first medium. That should be a structural advantage. Brands that understand this will invest in game-native experiences rather than forcing display ad logic into interactive environments.

The bot problem is becoming undeniable. This month marked the first time in internet history that more bots are online than humans. For brand marketers who are already skeptical about digital attribution, this is a significant concern. Gaming environments offer something increasingly rare: verified human attention. Players are actively engaged, not passively scrolling while bots inflate impression counts.

What This Means for Brand Leaders

If you are a CMO, VP of Brand, or marketing strategy leader, here is the practical frame I would take from Cannes this week.

Gaming is not a test-and-learn sandbox anymore. The scale is real. The audience is real. The attention is real. The question is not whether to invest in gaming, but how to build the internal capability to evaluate and execute on that investment thoughtfully.

Push your gaming partners on measurement. Ask them the hard questions about what success looks like, how it is tracked, and how it compares to your existing channel performance. The good partners will have answers. The ones who cannot get specific are not ready to steward your investment.

Think experiences before ads. The brands I saw generating genuine excitement at Cannes were not the ones talking about banner placements inside games. They were the ones who had built something worth playing, worth sharing, worth talking about.

And pay attention to the consolidation happening in this space. The platforms, publishers, and tech companies showing up at festivals like Cannes are not just making awareness plays. They are building the infrastructure that will define how brands access gaming audiences for the next decade. Getting into those conversations now, before the standards are set, is a significant competitive advantage.

Gaming’s Cannes moment has arrived. The industry showed up, made the pitch, and planted the flag. The brands that move from listening to acting in the next twelve months will be the ones writing the case studies everyone else will be studying in 2027. And I’m willing to bet we’ll see a lot more beachfront property occupied by gaming heavyweights next year.

What do you think? Are your teams starting to take gaming seriously as a media channel, or does the measurement gap still make it a hard sell internally? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment strategy for business leaders. If this was useful, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Subscribe now

His framing of where Skate sits in the market is the reason this piece exists. Skate is more grown up than Roblox and more laid back than Fortnite. Inside the game you can have fun and hang out with your friends, and you do not need a gun or anything to blow up to do it. That is rarer than it sounds, and it changes the brand opportunity completely.

This is Part 3 of the platform concentration series. In Part 2 I placed Skate in the top-left of the matrix: niche scale, very high cultural specificity. This week I want to make the affirmative case for why brand teams should consider that quadrant seriously, and what the first integrations are already telling us.

The Position Nobody Else Has

The positioning insight Hawley dropped is worth unpacking, because it identifies a gap the two dominant platforms have left uncovered.

Roblox is built for play that skews younger, even though the platform is desperately trying to age up (though it remains to be seen if their efforts bare fruit). Fortnite, despite its cultural curation, is fundamentally a shooter. Both platforms serve their audiences well. They also leave a space in the middle empty. Players who have aged out of Roblox and don’t want a combat-driven experience have, until recently, had no obvious next stop in immersive gaming.

Skate fills that gap from both directions. It functions as the intermediate step between Roblox and Fortnite for younger players growing into more sophisticated experiences, and as the off-ramp for Fortnite players who want a lower-intensity place to hang out with friends. The activity inside the game is rooted in something physical, something that exists in the real world, and something built around skill and self-expression rather than survival.

That positioning is the structural reason the brand opportunity in Skate behaves differently from the brand opportunity inside the two dominant platforms.

Previously released posts in this special series

Grounded in Everyday Life

The deeper reason Skate’s positioning matters for brand integration is that the in-game activities map directly to real-world habits.

Roblox and Fortnite, by design, transport players into invented worlds with invented physics, invented economies, and invented logic. Brand integrations inside those worlds have to play by the world’s rules. A real-world brand showing up in a fantasy game has to translate itself into the fantasy.

Skate works the opposite way. Players are skating in cities that feel like cities, past storefronts that feel like storefronts, in clothing and gear that the same person would buy in real life. The in-game footwear matters because real-world footwear matters in the culture. The boards matter because boards matter. The fashion matters because fashion is half the point.

This is the substrate brands have been looking for. An immersive game where brand integration does not require the brand to become something it isn’t. A Vans skate shoe in Skate is a Vans skate shoe. A Nike SB Dunk is a Nike SB Dunk. The fictional layer is minimal, and the everyday-life layer is the dominant frame.

The Nike SB Blueprint

The first proof point of this thesis is already live. From April 14 to May 5, 2026, EA ran a Nike SB Pop-Up Event in Skate, the most extensive brand collaboration the game has attempted to date.

The event delivered a Nike SB park takeover, a long-requested night-skating mode called Grom at Night, a series of challenges modeled on famous Nike SB skate videos, and a deep cosmetic catalog: the Nike SB Dunk Low, Dunk Low Pro, Dunk High, Zoom Blazer Mid, and over eight new footwear styles plus Nike SB hoodies, jorts, headwear, and bottoms. Players could earn select items by completing event challenges and purchase the rest from the in-game store.

The significant part of the Nike integration is not the cosmetics. It’s the structure. Nike is not parachuting into a fantasy game and asking players to suspend disbelief. The audience is already inside a skate experience where Nike SB is part of the cultural language. The integration meets players where they already are. That is exactly the authentic-fit dynamic Roblox and Fortnite struggle to manufacture, and it is the model for what comes next.

What Comes Next: Brands as Functional Roles

In my conversation with Hawley, one of the more compelling future directions the Skate team is exploring is in-game jobs. Players in Skate could take on roles that match the lived texture of a real city. One example currently being discussed: a delivery driver who brings packages to other players’ doorsteps.

Sit with that for a moment from a brand strategist’s perspective. If players can become delivery drivers in Skate, FedEx or UPS should be in the room before that mechanic ships. Every player who takes on the role becomes a moving FedEx or UPS billboard, in full uniform, doing the job the brand actually does, inside a city full of other players who see it dozens of times per session. That’s not a sponsored skin. That’s functional brand integration where the brand’s real-world category and the in-game role are the same thing.

The list extends quickly. A coffee shop run opens the door for Starbucks or Blue Bottle. A bike messenger gig invites cycling brands. A photo run for a magazine maps cleanly onto Thrasher. The principle is the same each time: the game’s everyday-life substrate gives brands a way to integrate as themselves, doing what they do in the real world, rather than as an awkward fantasy stand-in.

Skateboarding’s Concentric Circles

The other reason this opportunity is larger than the raw player numbers suggest is the cultural surface area of skateboarding itself.

Industry estimates put the global active skateboarding population at roughly 62 million people. That is a meaningful base on its own. It also dramatically undersells the audience for a brand integrating into skate culture, because skateboarding has been a cultural nucleus for fifty years with concentric circles of influence radiating outward into streetwear, music, fashion, art, film, and youth identity.

Louis Vuitton has put a skateboarder on its runways. Supreme built a billion-dollar brand on skate codes. Palace, Thrasher, Stüssy, Carhartt WIP, and Vans owe a meaningful share of their cultural relevance to skateboarding’s gravity. That radiating quality is why a brand entering Skate reaches dramatically more than the active participants. It reaches the streetwear consumer who has never touched a board. It reaches the fashion shopper who saw Vans Old Skools come back into style. It reaches the music fan whose favorite act references skate culture in its visuals. The audience is many multiples larger than the skater count, and it is the audience most brands actually want.

What the Data Says About Skate’s Audience

To pressure-test the concentric-circles argument, I recently ran a research pass on the global skateboarding fanbase using Elaris, an audience-intelligence platform. The fanbase segments cleanly into four core psychological personas. The more interesting finding for brand leaders sits in the cross-category cultural affinities of the largest segment.

The top 20 films and series this segment loves span Stranger Things, Rick and Morty, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Naruto, The Office, The Vampire Diaries, Family Guy, Peaky Blinders, and The Flash. The breadth is the point. This is an audience with mainstream entertainment appetite across prestige drama, sitcom comfort food, anime, fantasy IP, and global phenomena.

The top 20 brands the same segment loves include Nike, Adidas, Vans, Gucci, Converse, Samsung, Nintendo, Volcom, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Google, and Target. Read that list again. Skate-native footwear, luxury fashion, consumer electronics, gaming hardware, beverages, fast food, and big-box retail all coexist as top-tier brand loves for the same audience.

This is the concentric-circles argument in data. The skateboarding fan is a mainstream entertainment consumer with broad brand affinities that span the entire consumer-spending landscape. The brand opportunity inside Skate is for far more than the obvious skate-adjacent brands. It is for anyone whose target audience overlaps with this profile, which is most of the Fortune 500.

What This Means for Brand Leaders in 2026

Skate is not a Roblox-scale platform, and it never will be. It also does not need to be. The case for putting real strategy behind a Skate integration rests on three factors that no other immersive game on the matrix combines.

First, the structural positioning gap. Skate sits between the two dominant platforms on tone, intensity, and life-stage, and that gap is genuinely empty everywhere else in immersive gaming today.

Second, the everyday-life substrate. The mechanics of Skate let brands integrate as themselves, doing the real-world thing they actually do, rather than as fantasy stand-ins translated through a foreign world’s rules.

Third, the cultural surface area of skateboarding itself. Concentric circles of streetwear, music, and fashion give even smaller-scale activations a reach that no Roblox awareness play can replicate, and Elaris’s data shows the audience profile extends across the full consumer-brand landscape.

The Nike SB pop-up event is the early proof. What the Skate team is contemplating with in-game jobs is the more interesting frontier, because that is where the brand category and the in-game function start to align in ways that do not exist anywhere else in immersive gaming today.

Next week closes the series with a deeper conversation with Pete Hawley, General Manager at EA overseeing Skate, on how he and the team are thinking about the brand opportunity, what they want from partners, and where the franchise goes from here. You don’t want to miss it.

Which brand category in your portfolio could integrate authentically into Skate’s everyday-life substrate, and which still depends on fantasy-world translation to land in Roblox or Fortnite? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is the publication for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders navigating the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. Subscribe to get next week’s closing interview with Pete Hawley, General Manager at EA overseeing the Skate franchise.

Subscribe now

Yet what Paramount’s move signals is that gaming has far greater importance than just delivering great games in isolation based on IP that already exists. It’s about acknowledging that games can be the source of new IP as well, while giving fans the ability to immerse themselves more deeply into all of the worlds of their favorite characters.

Structure Follows Strategy

By elevating games into its dedicated vertical next to all other media formats, Paramount Skydance is walking its talk regarding the importance of games for the company going forward. It’s a perfect example of the foundational business strategy principle that Alfred Chandler coined in 1962: structure follows strategy. The idea is that an organization needs to define its objectives and the strategy to achieve those objectives first, and only then shape the organizational structure in a way that optimally supports the strategy. For a company that strategically views gaming as a “core pillar” of its content strategy alongside film, television, and streaming, it’s only consequential to make gaming its own vertical.

Previously released post relevant to this

How Paramount Games Studio Is Built

The newly formed Paramount Games Studio consolidates three previously separate entities under one roof: Skydance Interactive, Skydance New Media, and Paramount’s historically licensing-focused game business. Tony Driscoll, Paramount’s head of corporate strategy and development, was named president of the studio. Dan Prigg, previously head of Skydance Interactive, steps up as EVP and Head of Games. Shawn Kittelsen takes the role of SVP of Creative and Production, and Amy Hennig — the acclaimed creative director who co-headed Skydance New Media — moves into the role of Studio Creative Director. The model spans three tracks: internal development, co-development with external partners such as Platinum Games on TMNT: The Last Ronin, and licensing, with all three now reporting through a single organization. Additional titles in active development include Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and an untitled Star Wars game, both inherited from Skydance New Media.

They Are Not the Only Ones

Paramount is not the first major entertainment company to draw this conclusion. Two others are worth benchmarking against.

Netflix established its gaming division in 2021 as a standalone content vertical, treating games as a pillar on par with original series. It now offers over 100 titles on its platform, has acquired studios including Night School Studio and Boss Fight Entertainment, and continues to expand the offering without ads or in-app purchases. Netflix made a deliberate organizational choice early: games would not live inside its content licensing team. They would have their own leadership, their own budgets, and their own mandate.

The New York Times built the same logic from scratch. NYT Games started with the flagship crossword and a string of acquisitions — most notably Wordle in 2022 — and grew into a standalone content vertical with its own subscription product, its own creative team, and its own growth mandate. By 2025, NYT Games had over 10 million daily players and more than one million standalone subscribers. Games is now one of the most important drivers of the company’s digital subscription growth. And the IP is beginning to flow in the other direction too: Wordle is being adapted into an NBC television show. A game that originates IP that then travels to TV, not the other way around. This is precisely the dynamic Prigg described. The New York Times arrived there because it chose to give games its own organizational home rather than fold it into the news product.

In my book Press Play, I make the case that the companies winning in gaming are the ones that let their gaming efforts breathe and run according to gaming’s own inner clock — not the production schedules and approval chains that govern TV and film. That means giving games their own organizational home, their own senior leadership, and the latitude to build differently. Paramount’s move is exactly that principle in action.

Three Learnings for Organizations Serious About Gaming

The Paramount announcement offers a clear template. If you are a marketing, brand, or strategy leader at any entertainment company or consumer brand with meaningful IP, here is what the move tells you.

First: organizational structure is a strategic statement

How you house gaming inside your business signals what you actually believe about it. A gaming function buried inside a licensing department is a licensing business. A gaming function with its own president, its own executive bench, and its own mandate to develop original IP is a content business. The structure tells your organization, your talent market, and your partners what the ambition really is.

Second: gaming is an IP origin engine, not just an IP extension

Prigg’s conviction — that games are where new stories can begin, not just where existing stories get adapted — reframes the entire economic case for gaming investment. The companies that treat gaming as downstream of film and TV will always be playing catch-up. The ones that treat it as a peer medium will own franchises the others will eventually try to license.

Third: talent specificity matters

Paramount did not promote a general entertainment executive to run Paramount Games Studio. It assembled a leadership team with experience at Epic Games, EA, WB Games, Unity, Scopely, and NetherRealm Studios. Gaming runs on different rhythms, different creative cultures, and different player expectations than any other medium. The right org structure falls apart without the right talent inside it.

The question for every executive audience here is the same one Paramount just answered for itself: if you believe gaming matters to your business, does your organizational structure reflect that belief?

Technically Entertaining covers business strategy at the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment — for the decision-makers shaping what comes next. The executives who understand gaming’s strategic value today are the ones setting the agenda tomorrow. Join them.

Subscribe now

Car brands and gadget makers have benefitted greatly from their partnership with the Bond movies — which is why CMOs and brand leaders should pay even greater attention to a move another consumer brand that is closely associated with 007 just took to promote its latest model. I’m talking about iconic watch maker Omega. Rather than wait for the next James Bond movie to be released in theatres in 2028, they recognized that a more effective medium exists that Omega can leverage right now to engage Bond fans and consumers. Video games. It launched a special edition Omega Seamaster Diver 300M Chrono “007 First Light” for the new James Bond video game called 007 First Light that is currently breaking sales records and raking in one critical acclaim after the next.

It’s a masterclass in modern brand strategy that demonstrates how impactful video games as a channel for brands are, if the execution is done well. Before we dive into the specifics and distill learnings you can take with you into your next meeting, let’s look at a bit of history of how the Omega watch ended up on 007’s wrist in the first place.

Omega owes the world to a custome designer

Lindy Hemming. She was the costume designer for the movie GoldenEye that decided to replace Rolex with the blue-dial Omega Seamaster. It elevated Omega’s image into the modern world of coveted luxury watches and authentically aligned with the infamous Bond persona: maritime and military heritage and backstory, self-made, active individual. All directly woven into the plots of each movie as an essential piece of spy equipment.

It created unparalleled fandom and consumer desire, resulting in collectors and fans actively seeking out every new model to the point where Bond’s Omega watches wouldn’t just hold their value, they’d dramatically appreciate. Just one example from the year 2022: As part of the 60th anniversary celebrations for James Bond, Omega received record bids for Bond watches via an auction with Christie’s: GBP 226,800 (or about $279,475 in US dollars) for a Seamaster Diver 300M 007 Edition designed in collaboration with actor Daniel Craig.

Omega watches and James Bond, specifically James Bond movies, go hand in hand. So why is it that Omega’s brand leadership decided to launch its newest Seamaster model inside of a James Bond video game?

The short answer is the following: active engagement by consumers in video games is far more valuable than passive engagements in other channels, be it the movie theatre, TV, or social media. Active engagement leads to higher conversion rates, and therefore higher sales. The Omega watch launch inside the game 007 First Light is the real-life proof.

007 First Light: The Game That Broke Records on Day One

Developed by IO Interactive, the Copenhagen-based studio behind the critically acclaimed Hitman franchise in partnership with Amazon MGM Studios, 007 First Light launched on May 27, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows PC. The game follows a 26-year-old James Bond across a series of missions as he earns his “00” status. It’s a fresh origin story drawn from Ian Fleming’s novels and the broader film universe, but told entirely through new eyes.

It was the first James Bond console game in over a decade, arriving 14 years after the commercially disappointing 007 Legends in 2012. The difference in reception could not be more dramatic. 007 First Light sold 1.5 million copies in its first 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling title in IO Interactive’s history, outselling every Hitman entry over the same window. Critics matched the commercial enthusiasm: the game scored an 88 on OpenCritic and an 87 on Metacritic, landing it firmly among the standout releases of 2026. Reviewers consistently praised its faithful recreation of the Bond universe — the tone, the tension, the style — all hitting the same notes that made the films iconic.

For a brand like Omega, this is the context that matters. This is a massive, high-quality piece of Bond content reaching millions of engaged consumers at a moment when the next Bond film is still two years away.

How Omega Put Its Watch Inside the Game — and What Happened Next

Omega did not simply license its logo to appear in the background of a cutscene. The Seamaster Diver 300M Chronograph is a functional piece of gameplay in 007 First Light. The watch’s chronograph subdials are used during missions, making it a tool Bond actually interacts with — not decoration. This is a meaningful distinction. IO Interactive and Omega collaborated closely to design a watch that is narratively embedded in the experience.

The real-world version, the Omega Seamaster Diver 300M Chronograph 007 First Light, launched days before the game’s release at $9,400. It is the first time Bond has worn a chronograph since Roger Moore’s Seiko in 1985’s A View to a Kill — a 40-year break that makes the design choice both historically significant and editorially driven. The watch features distinctive bi-color chronograph subdial rings (one outlined in PVD bronze gold, one in black), a ceramic case, the Omega Co-Axial Master Chronometer Caliber 9900 movement, and a special NATO strap with “007” engraved on the titanium buckle and “First Light” on the keepers. Six additional game-inspired NATO strap options are available separately.

The commercial results have been strong. The watch sold through retail allocations quickly, generating significant consumer and media interest across the watch, gaming, and lifestyle press simultaneously — an audience crossover that a standard film tie-in rarely achieves.

Three Learnings Every Brand Strategist Should Take from This

This is more than an interesting case study from the watch category. The Omega x 007 First Light integration offers a clear framework for how brands should think about video games as a channel. Three learnings stand out.

1. Gaming gives you an always-on presence, independent of a theatrical release schedule.

Omega has historically launched new Bond Seamasters to coincide with film releases. That model puts the brand entirely at the mercy of a studio’s production timeline. The next Bond film is expected in 2028. Waiting would mean two-plus years of silence from one of Omega’s most commercially powerful brand pillars. By moving into gaming, Omega reaches Bond fans on their schedule — daily, whenever a player picks up a controller. The game will be played for years. Every session is another impression, another moment the watch appears on Bond’s wrist.

2. The integration works because it’s authentic — and authenticity is the threshold for effectiveness.

This did not feel like a brand inserting itself into content. The watch is functional within the gameplay. IO Interactive built the game’s version of the watch with Omega, making the chronograph subdials part of how players actually interact with missions. Reviewers noted that the game captures the same spirit as the films — the same tone, the same aesthetic DNA that made the Omega-Bond partnership meaningful in the first place. Authenticity isn’t a nice-to-have in gaming integrations. It’s the threshold between effectiveness and invisibility. Consumers in games are highly attuned to what belongs and what doesn’t.

3. Active engagement converts at a fundamentally different rate than passive consumption.

According to McKinsey’s analysis of gaming’s attention economy, roughly 75 percent of PC and console players report high focus while playing — a level of engagement comparable only to live events, and one that handily outperforms social media, newspapers, and podcasts. Critically, McKinsey found that a 10 percent increase in consumer focus correlates with a 17 percent increase in spend. The consumer sitting in a movie theatre watching Bond strap on an Omega is a passive viewer. The consumer playing 007 First Light and using that same watch as a tool in their mission is an active participant. That distinction is not abstract. It shows up in conversion rates, in purchase intent, and ultimately in sales.

Omega understood this. Its brand leadership did not wait for the film industry to catch up. They found the highest-quality Bond content available right now, embedded themselves in it authentically, and launched a real product tied to it. The results — in both game sales and watch demand — validated the strategy.

What do you think? Is video game integration the future of luxury brand partnerships — or does it only work when the IP is as strong as James Bond? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment strategy for brand and marketing leaders. If this kind of analysis is valuable to you, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

At a recent industry event, a brand executive shared with me the advice they had just received from a partner at a major marketing agency, the partner who oversees gaming activations for the firm’s brand clients. The advice was delivered with the confidence of a person who gets paid to know better. “Just integrate your brand in existing games, ideally Roblox or Fortnite.”

That is the playbook being sold to brand leaders in 2026. It is also exactly the playbook I argued against in the opener of this series.

So this week I want to give you the framework I actually use to map the landscape.

I’ll introduce you to the 2x2 matrix (yes, I know, but we can mock them all we want. 2x2s work!) every brand leader that evaluates gaming opportunities for his brand has to know. A 2x2 matrix gives a distinct and clear picture regarding a key decision to make on typically the two most critical decision parameters, which become the axes. The axes I’ll use here: audience scale and cultural specificity. Scale captures how many people you can reach. Specificity captures how coherent the gaming platform’s cultural identity is, and therefore how clearly your brand either belongs there or doesn’t.

These two axes pull against each other, and the tension is the point. Scale exerts a genericizing gravity. The larger a platform’s audience, the harder it becomes to hold a distinct point of view, because a point of view always excludes someone. Mass platforms drift toward the lowest common denominator. The vertical axis measures which platforms surrendered to that pull and which resisted it. GTA VI is the proof that resistance is possible: a franchise with enormous reach that never sanded down its edges.

I lay these four games on the matrix: Roblox, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto VI, and Skate. There are other games that can be mapped on this matrix. The point is not to be complete. The point is to prevent leaders from simply taking their brand to Roblox - into one quadrant - when other and potentially better suited options exist.

The biggest strategic mistake I see brand teams make is defaulting into one quadrant when their brand belongs in another.

Roblox: The Crowd

Roblox is the undisputed scale leader in immersive gaming. Hundreds of millions of monthly users, the destination GEEIQ tracks as the home of 54.5% of all Media & Entertainment activations in virtual worlds, and the deepest creator ecosystem in the category by a wide margin.

What Roblox does not have, and what most brand decks underplay, is a defining cultural identity. The platform’s strength is its lack of one. Roblox is a substrate. More than 40 million games live on it (a figure Lisa Willet, Senior Director of Global Strategic Partnerships at Roblox, acknowledged publicly at the iicon conference earlier this year), and the dominant aesthetic shifts by experience. That openness lets a Vans skate park, a Nike training center, and a Walmart shopping mall coexist on the same platform. It also makes brand activations on Roblox feel interchangeable to anyone who isn’t already inside the build.

Visually, Roblox lives in blocky, low-polygon, primary-color territory. The aesthetic is intentionally simple and accessible to younger players, and it carries the same limitation everywhere it goes. A luxury watch, a premium fashion house, or any brand that depends on visual sophistication to signal value will struggle to read as itself inside Roblox. The brands that look right here are those whose identity already aligns with playful, toy-like aesthetics: LEGO, Hot Wheels, family entertainment, fast-casual food.

Roblox itself signals the limitation through its developer economics. In 2025, the platform rolled out a payout structure that pays developers up to 42% more on revenue generated by U.S. players aged 18 and older, an explicit move to seed mature, 17+ rated content on a platform whose base audience and aesthetic skew young. A platform with its own cultural center wouldn’t need to subsidize one. The Crowd skews young by default, and Roblox is paying developers extra to engineer older-skewing cultural pockets inside it. For brand teams, the read is that adult-skewing or culturally specific positioning on Roblox lives inside the niche corners the platform is paying developers to build. The base aesthetic still defaults to the broad, young, and generic territory that defines the Crowd.

This is the bottom-right of the matrix: mass scale, low cultural specificity. A crowd delivers reach, foot traffic, and discovery. What it cannot lend you is cultural authority. The right brand fit is awareness plays and creator collaborations. The wrong fit is anything that needs cultural weight to land.

Fortnite: The Festival

Fortnite has 650 million registered users and a cultural relevance that punches above its absolute scale. The reason is structural. Epic has spent the last three years curating Fortnite into a cultural venue through high-profile IP integrations: Travis Scott, The Simpsons, South Park, K-Pop Demon Hunters, the Star Wars events, and the deepening Disney partnership that followed Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games in February 2024.

That curation gives Fortnite something Roblox doesn’t have: an actual cultural identity, even if much of it is borrowed. Fortnite is a festival. The headline acts are booked, the lineup rotates, and audiences arrive for the moment as much as the venue. Brands plugging into it benefit from Epic’s curatorial filter.

The trade-off is that Fortnite’s culture is largely defined by the IP Epic has already chosen to integrate. Your brand activation borrows the cultural relevance Epic has assembled. The platform sets the terms, and your brand operates inside its frame. Epic’s UEFN framework also constrains creative latitude in ways Roblox doesn’t (though it has made positive improvements in this area).

Visually, Fortnite is stylized cartoony-realism: vibrant, cinematic, with a polish that sits between Roblox’s blockiness and console-grade photorealism. The art direction is flexible enough to absorb animated, live-action, and musical IP without breaking its own visual identity. The fit weakens for brands that need either gritty realism or restrained premium polish. Fortnite events look like Fortnite, regardless of what’s plugged into them.

This is the middle-right of the matrix: mass scale, medium-to-high cultural specificity. The right brand fit is brands with strong cultural IP that want amplification through Epic’s network.

Grand Theft Auto VI: The Metropolis

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick just days ago confirmed the date: GTA VI launches later this year, November 19, and lands in the top-right of the matrix the moment it opens to players. The franchise has sold more than 425 million copies in its lifetime and built one of the most coherent universes in entertainment: satirical Americana, hip-hop and pop-culture saturation, and a fanbase that has spent two decades inside the Rockstar tone.

That tone is the asset. GTA VI is a metropolis, a place dense enough to hold millions of people and still feel unmistakably like itself. GTA’s radio stations have parodied brand culture since the original release. The map is built around branded storefronts, billboards, and product references that the audience reads as part of the world, the same way they read the in-game satire. The fanbase expects brand presence and accepts it on Rockstar’s terms.

The catch is that Rockstar has historically refused real brand integrations. In a recent Variety interview at the iicon conference, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick confirmed that GTA VI will not feature real brand names, explaining:

“It’s a fictional world and everything in it is fictional. So we’re not even at risk of doing brand partnerships because all the brands are made up.”

From the same stage, Zelnick acknowledged the company has received many requests from brands eager to integrate, even as Rockstar holds the line.

My read remains the one I made in the opener: if these become true integrations with Rockstar holding creative sign-off, the economics will eventually become too compelling for Take-Two to leave on the table.

Visually, GTA VI is photorealistic, gritty, satirical, and unmistakably mature. The franchise’s art direction lives in the lineage of cinematic crime drama crossed with American satire, now rendered with top-tier console fidelity. The aesthetic fits adult lifestyle brands, automotive, spirits, fashion (especially streetwear), and premium audio in ways that no other immersive game on this matrix can match.

This is also where GTA VI’s M-rating becomes a strategic asset rather than a constraint. Roblox and Fortnite have to maintain audience appropriateness for younger players, which limits the kind of brand content that can land authentically. GTA VI carries no such constraint. The platform IS the 18+ audience, which makes it the only immersive game on this matrix where adult-targeted brand content (R-rated humor, mature lifestyle, beer and spirits, fashion brands with edgier creative) can show up without compromise. For brands whose actual audience skews adult, that is rare oxygen.

This is the top-right of the matrix: mass scale, very high cultural specificity, with a uniquely adult audience profile. Built-in audience, curated entry, high ceiling for the brands that earn it.

Skate: The Scene

Skate occupies the quadrant no other platform on this matrix can reach. EA’s Skate launched into free-to-play early access on September 16, 2025. The game crossed 15 million players in under three weeks, passed 23 million players by the end of 2025, and is currently maintaining 750,000+ daily active users. That’s still a fraction of Roblox or Fortnite’s scale, but a fast-moving fraction with an audience the larger platforms can’t reach.

That smaller scale is the entire strategic point. Skateboarding reads as a niche only if you count participants. It is really a cultural nucleus, with concentric rings radiating outward into streetwear, music, fashion, art, and film. A brand entering the skate scene reaches far more than skaters. It taps a culture that has shaped youth identity and adjacent industries for fifty years, punching well above its participation numbers the whole time. That radiating quality is why the Scene holds value despite the smaller raw audience.

The Scene also carries the most developed brand-association language in action sports. Nike SB, Vans, Supreme, Thrasher, Independent Trucks, Element, Spitfire. These brands ARE the language of skateboarding. They built it from the inside, sponsoring riders before anyone called it influencer marketing. New entrants who don’t speak that language get rejected by the audience. New entrants who do speak it get adopted with a fluency that Roblox and Fortnite activations rarely achieve.

Visually, Skate’s language is realistic with edge: motion-graphic energy, urban grit, the camera angles and color grading of a real skate documentary. The art direction is already aligned with the visual codes that Vans, Nike SB, Supreme, and Thrasher have used in their marketing for decades, which means brands that fit those codes get cultural read for free. The misfit is corporate, B2B, polished-luxury, or anything that signals visual restraint. Skate doesn’t look restrained, and that is the point.

The Nike collaboration already present in the game’s early access is the early proof point. I’ll go deeper on that, the broader brand opportunity, and the conversations EA is having with brand partners in next week’s deep dive.

This is the top-left of the matrix: niche scale, very high cultural specificity. The quadrant most brand decks skip past, and the one most likely to deliver disproportionate cultural credibility.

What the Matrix Actually Tells You

The matrix is a trade-space, not a leaderboard. Each quadrant rewards a different strategic intent. The Crowd rewards low-cost reach experiments and Gen Alpha exposure. The Festival rewards brands with strong cultural IP that want amplification through Epic’s network. The Metropolis rewards adult-focused brands, and those patient enough to earn a place in Rockstar’s world. The Scene rewards brands with authentic claim to a subculture.

The empty bottom-left quadrant, niche scale with low cultural specificity, is correctly empty. Almost no brand should aim there.

The brand teams making the strongest gaming decisions in 2026 treat this as a portfolio question. They place a smaller bet in the Scene because that is where their core audience already lives, and run a broader awareness play in the Festival because that is where their next demographic will discover them. They resist defaulting the entire budget to the Crowd just because Roblox tops the activation-count chart in last year’s report.

The question to bring back to your team this quarter is which quadrant best matches what you are trying to do, and whether your current strategy is biased toward the right one.

Next week: the Skate deep dive. Specifically, why skateboarding culture is uniquely attractive to brands, what Nike’s early integration is telling us about the platform’s brand potential, and the conversations EA is having with brand partners that haven’t made it into the trade press yet.

Which quadrant does your brand actually belong in, and which quadrant is your current activation strategy biased toward? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is the publication for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders navigating the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. Subscribe to get next week’s deep dive into Skate, plus the closing interview with the General Manager at EA overseeing the franchise.

Subscribe now

Forty million. That’s the room your brand experience is being asked to stand out in.

I bring this up because the question I get asked most often in executive meetings these days is some version of: “Which gaming platform should we be on?” And almost every time, the person asking has already half-decided the answer. Usually it’s Roblox. Sometimes it’s Fortnite. The kneejerk reaction across boardrooms is to default to the two platforms that dominate the headlines.

The data, on the surface, supports that instinct. According to GEEIQ’s Q2 2026 Media & Entertainment Micro Report, 78.4% of all Media & Entertainment brand activations in virtual worlds happen on either Roblox (54.5%) or Fortnite (23.9%). The category itself has grown 79-fold since 2020, from 10 tracked activations to 789 today. And as of 2026, integrations into existing worlds have overtaken brand-owned experiences for the first time, sitting at 58% of the mix.

If you’re an executive scanning these charts, the playbook looks obvious. Go where the audience already lives. Plug in.

That playbook is a trap. The honest answer to “which platform should we be on?” is almost never a single platform. It’s a thoughtful, nuanced “it depends.”

This is the first piece in a four-part series on platform concentration in immersive gaming. Over the coming weeks I’ll walk through the 2x2 framework I use with brand leaders to map their options, take a deep dive into Skate as the overlooked alternative now rising up, and close the series with an interview with the General Manager at EA overseeing the Skate franchise. Today’s piece is the foundation: why concentrating your gaming spend in two platforms is more fragile than it looks, and the five questions every brand leader needs to answer before signing the contract.

The Concentration Problem Brands Aren’t Pricing In

The 78.4% number from GEEIQ is the headline you’ve probably already seen circulating in trade decks. What deserves more attention is what’s underneath it.

Six years ago, the category was 90% brand-owned experiences. Brands built their own worlds, hired their own teams, controlled their own roadmaps. Today, 58% of activations are integrations into someone else’s platform. That shift has delivered enormous gains in speed and scale. It has also represented a quiet transfer of leverage, from the brand to the platform owner.

Previously released posts relevant to this story.

Algorithm changes you can’t predict. Revenue share changes you can’t negotiate. Audience composition shifts you can’t control. The same dynamics that have made marketers wary of putting their entire budget on Meta or TikTok are now playing out inside two gaming platforms. The executives I speak with are starting to ask the same questions they asked about social five years ago: what happens when the rules change?

Question One: What Is the Activation Actually For?

Before you pick a platform, get specific about the goal. Are you running a broad brand awareness play with a younger demographic? Then yes, Roblox and Fortnite should be on your list. Roblox in particular still skews younger, and Fortnite gives you cultural relevance across Gen Z and Millennials.

If your goal is to drive real-world commerce with the affluent, core-consumer demographic, the answer changes completely. The average mobile gamer globally is between 36 and 41 years old. That’s where household economic decision-making sits. That’s where credit cards already get pulled out for in-app purchases on a daily basis. Mobile games should be at or near the top of your list, and a Roblox build is almost certainly the wrong place to put your dollars.

The platform follows the goal. Reverse that order and you end up with an activation that looked good in the pitch deck and underperformed in market.

Question Two: Who Is the Audience, Really?

Every platform has its own culture. Roblox is a creator-first ecosystem where teen builders set the pace. Fortnite is a cultural mainline where Travis Scott, The Simpsons, and South Park share the same stage. Mobile games like Royal Match or Coin Master attract a different audience entirely: short play sessions, often on the couch, frequently in the over-35 bracket. Players come to each of these games for different reasons, and they arrive open to different brand messages.

Brands don’t have to be everywhere. They need to be where they can authentically meet their ideal audience. That requires deepening your understanding of player preferences, the dynamics unique to each platform, and how your brand actually fits the room. The best activations I’ve seen come from brand teams that picked one or two platforms with real conviction about why. The weakest come from brand teams that picked the platforms that scored well on a reach chart.

Question Three: Where Is the Playing Field Going?

The map for 2026 looks different from the map for 2025. Two games in particular are about to change the calculus.

Grand Theft Auto VI launches later this year. Given Rockstar’s live operations chops and the franchise’s broad fandom, GTA VI will be an extremely attractive playground for brands. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has already confirmed on stage that the company has been receiving many requests and offers from brands to integrate. So far, Rockstar has stayed away to avoid “tarnishing” the experience with ads. My read: if these became actual brand integrations with Rockstar holding creative sign-off, rather than ad units, the money becomes too appealing for Take-Two to turn down indefinitely.

EA’s Skate, currently in soft launch, has roughly 2 million monthly active users and is actively experimenting and negotiating with brands. It doesn’t have the scale of Roblox or Fortnite yet, and it doesn’t need to in order to become an attractive alternative for brand spend. Skateboarding culture brings something the larger platforms can’t easily replicate: an authentic subculture with decades of real-world brand history, from Nike SB to Vans to Supreme.

Welevel is another emerging option worth keeping an eye on. The point of all this is not to chase every shiny object. The point is that the platform map for immersive games is genuinely about to expand, and concentrating your spend on two platforms right now means you’re not building the relationships, the data, or the team you’ll need to act when the map shifts under your feet.

Question Four: Can You Actually Be Found?

Back to Lisa Willet’s admission for a second. Forty million games on Roblox. Discovery is broken to the point where the platform itself is investing heavily to fix it. That fact alone should reframe how you think about “scale” on Roblox.

Yes, the platform has hundreds of millions of users. Your brand experience is not competing for their attention against the other 217 brands GEEIQ tracks. It’s competing against 40 million experiences, most of them built by independent creators with stronger native audiences than any brand will ever have. The cost of standing out is going up. The CPM math that justified the build a year ago looks different today.

This is the part most brand briefs underprice. Reach on the platform is a separate question from reach inside the platform.

Question Five: Who Owns the Data and the Inventory?

This is the question I’ve heard more in the last few weeks than in the previous twelve months combined. Brand leaders are increasingly asking: what would it take for us to build our own game, or at least partner in a way where we have full access to the entire world?

Two reasons keep coming up.

First, first-party data. Roblox and Fortnite share information with brands to varying degrees of transparency, and the level of access differs by brand and by deal. Even the most generous platform-side data sharing comes nowhere close to what brands can unlock when they own the entire experience. Owning the customer relationship inside a game means combining gameplay signals with everything you already know from your CRM, your retail footprint, your loyalty program. That’s a fundamentally different asset than a top-line engagement report from a third-party platform.

Second, inventory. For media companies in particular, owning the game means owning a new advertising surface they can monetize with their existing ad partners. Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount have stopped thinking about gaming as a marketing line item. They’re thinking about it as an inventory category. That’s a different conversation, and it leads to different platform choices.

Treat Platform Selection Like Retail Selection

The default to Roblox or Fortnite has a real logic behind it. Both platforms deliver scale, engagement, and a clear unit-economics story. The problem is that brand leaders too often arrive at the answer before they’ve asked the question. Concentration risk, discovery friction, and a static view of the platform map quietly make the decision for them.

The brands that will win the next phase of immersive gaming are the ones treating platform selection the way they treat retail selection. Not every store carries your audience. Not every store fits your brand. Not every store will be open in three years. The same logic applies here.

In the next piece, I’ll walk through the 2x2 matrix I use to map Roblox, Fortnite, GTA VI, and Skate against the two variables that matter most: scale of audience and cultural specificity. The matrix is what turns “it depends” into a decision you can actually defend in the boardroom.

Which platform are you betting on for 2026, and what’s the question that’s pointing you there? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is the publication for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders navigating the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. Subscribe to get the rest of this four-part series on platform concentration in immersive gaming, starting with next week’s deep dive into the 2x2 matrix that maps Roblox, Fortnite, GTA VI, and Skate.

Subscribe now

When I asked him about the strategy behind the gaming offering, how he plans to build it, position it, and grow it, his answer was disarmingly simple:

“It’s easy. We’ll just copy what The New York Times is doing.”

I have heard that exact answer more times than I can count over the past 18 months. In executive workshops, on stage at industry conferences, in private investor meetings. Always the same sentence. Sometimes with a knowing smile.

The New York Times has become the default reference point for gaming strategy in the news and media industry, and for good reason. Since acquiring Wordle in January 2022 for a reported low seven figures, the company has stitched together a games portfolio that now drives billions of plays per year and shows up repeatedly in earnings calls as a key contributor to subscriber growth, bundle conversion, and engagement. NYT Games has done what every publisher dreams of doing: turn casual readers into daily habits and daily habits into paid subscriptions.

So copying The New York Times sounds like a safe bet. It is the opposite of safe. It is one of the most dangerous strategic moves a media executive can make in 2026.

Why Copying The New York Times Gaming Playbook Is a Strategic Trap

There are two structural reasons the “just copy the NYT” mindset breaks down at the foundation.

First, copying a competitor’s playbook is the fastest route to commoditization. The single most important premise of any successful games offering is authenticity. The portfolio has to stay true to the brand and be grounded in the publisher’s unique audience. Copying what others are doing is the direct contradiction of that premise. It produces sameness, and sameness erases the differentiation that gaming is supposed to create in the first place.

Second, every piece of content a news organization creates has to be grounded in the audience first. When you copy someone else’s playbook, you inherit their assumptions about their readership without ever questioning whether those assumptions apply to yours. What converts a Times reader in Manhattan into a paying subscriber may have nothing to do with what your readers in Munich, Madrid, or Manchester want from your brand. The execution can look identical and the outcome can be wildly different.

The proof is already on the table. Walk through the gaming offerings of major newspapers and magazines around the world today and you will find the same default product on the homepage over and over again: a crossword puzzle. The Washington Post, Die Zeit, Bild, The Guardian, Le Monde. Every major publisher’s first move into games has been to ship a crossword and call it a strategy.

Crosswords have a real heritage in print journalism. They are connected to newspapers the way pickles are connected to a good cheeseburger. Pickles, however, do not all taste the same. There are dozens of other ingredients that make a cheeseburger great. If every publisher serves the same pickle, the entire category tastes identical to the consumer. The differentiation collapses the moment everyone shows up with the same recipe.

How Bloomberg Uses Games as a Subscription Funnel

Two publishers are demonstrating what a differentiated, audience-first games strategy actually looks like in practice: Bloomberg and The Atlantic. Both are building out gaming offerings. Both are following different playbooks. Both are getting real traction.

Bloomberg currently has two games live inside its “Explore” content section:

1. Pointed, a weekly news game for risk-takers, launched in March 2025 and grounded in current events and the news cycle.

2. Alphadots, a daily word puzzle, launched in September 2025.

The two games are presented as standalone products in the Explore section. There is no bundled, branded games destination yet. To play either of them, users only have to register with an email address and create a free account. No subscription required.

The strategic intent is clear. Bloomberg is using games as a top-of-funnel acquisition engine for its broader digital subscription business. The hook is the game. The conversion target is the subscription. The bet is on cross-pollination: a user who comes in for Pointed gets exposed to Bloomberg’s terminal-grade journalism, market data, opinion content, and over time the habit forms. The games themselves pull from the same editorial DNA as the rest of the publication. Current events. Markets. The news cycle. The game is a free sample of what the Bloomberg brand actually stands for.

This is the part most publishers miss. Bloomberg has resisted the temptation to build games as a separate entertainment product bolted onto the side of the newsroom. The games are an extension of the journalism. They reinforce the brand promise of being deeply plugged into the news and the markets. That is what makes the funnel work.

How The Atlantic Built a Six-Game Portfolio That Mirrors Its Editorial DNA

The Atlantic is one step further down the learning curve. The publication has scaled to six games in a remarkably short window. The lineup includes the expected crossword, but it also includes trivia, word games, and a daily puzzle game that uncovers historical facts tied to a specific date in the year.

What makes this portfolio interesting is the mix. Yes, there is a crossword. There is also a trivia game directly connected to recent Atlantic stories and reporting. There is a history-driven puzzle that authentically mirrors The Atlantic’s editorial approach of going deeper into any given topic and pulling in historical context. The history game feels like a playable version of an Atlantic feature, and that is exactly the point.

Five of the six games are free to play directly on the website and inside the app. One game sits fully behind the subscription paywall. That single design choice tells you everything about where The Atlantic sits in its learning journey.

Games are still primarily an acquisition funnel: a reason for new users to come in, sign up, and come back weekly. The paywalled game signals something more advanced. It suggests The Atlantic has early internal evidence that games drive measurable conversion from free user to paid subscriber, and that they materially contribute to subscriber retention and stickiness once a user is in. The New York Times has been signaling exactly that pattern in its quarterly results for two years. The Atlantic is now building on that learning with its own audience and its own editorial voice.

The Real Business Case for Games in News and Media

Step back from the specific products for a moment. The high-level appeal of games for news and media organizations is obvious if you understand consumer behavior.

Games provide a reason to come back daily. They fit naturally into the routines consumers already have: checking emails, reading the news, looking at the stock market, playing a game over morning coffee. The behavioral hook is the same one the morning paper used to own.

Games also extend session time. They increase the number of touchpoints per user per week. They create habit loops that are measurable and predictable. They generate first-party engagement data that can inform editorial, advertising, and product decisions across the company. They are one of the few content formats that holds up against TikTok and Instagram for daily share of mind. Every major news publisher should have a games strategy on the executive agenda right now.

The mistake is never in having a strategy. The mistake is in the execution.

What News and Media Executives Should Build Instead

If you are sitting in the Chief Digital Officer chair, the Chief Product Officer chair, or the CEO chair of a news or media business in 2026, the right question is “what do my readers want that I can authentically and uniquely deliver in game form?”

For a general-interest newspaper, a high-quality crossword or sudoku may genuinely be the most authentic answer. The format and the audience match. That is a defensible choice.

For a sports publication, the most authentic answer is almost certainly a fantasy or manager-style game. Readers come for standings, trades, and matchups. The game has to feel like an extension of that obsession.

For a fashion magazine, the most authentic answer lives closer to a styling game, an interior design challenge, or a daily aesthetic puzzle.

For a financial publication like Bloomberg, the most authentic answer is a market-aware news game like Pointed.

For an ideas-driven publication like The Atlantic, the most authentic answer is a history-driven puzzle game tied to the editorial worldview.

The pattern is consistent across every category. The best games offering for any publisher is the one that reflects what the publication uniquely stands for and what its specific audience deeply cares about. The Times did not become great at games by copying anyone. It built its games strategy around the cultural authority and crossword heritage of the Times brand. Copying The New York Times means copying a strategy that was designed around someone else’s audience.

The Bottom Line for News and Media Executives

The next three years will separate the publishers who win at games from the publishers who built tribute acts. The category is already crowding with crossword clones from every major newsroom in North America and Europe. The early winners will be the publishers who treat games the way the best of them treat editorial: as an authentic, distinctive expression of what the brand does best, in service of an audience that is uniquely theirs.

Bloomberg and The Atlantic are showing the playbook in real time. They are asking the right question first and shipping the answer second. That sequence is the entire game.

If your gaming strategy starts with a screenshot of the NYT homepage, the call you should make next week is the one that brings your audience research, your editorial leadership, and your product team into the same room. Then ask one question: what would our readers find irresistible that nobody else can build?

The answer to that question is your games strategy.

What do you think? Are publishers in your market building authentic, audience-first games offerings, or is the crossword playbook winning by default? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is a Substack publication on the business of gaming, technology, and entertainment for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders. If this piece was useful to you, subscribe for weekly analysis.

Subscribe now

A few days later, the news hit. Google DeepMind had taken a minority stake in Fenris Creations, the studio formerly known as CCP Games and the developer of EVE Online. The same week, Alexandre Moufarek, Product Lead for Project Inception at DeepMind, sat on that panel and explained why gameplay data is foundational to advancing Gemini and the next generation of AI systems. Moufarek’s career started in video games. So did Demis Hassabis’s. Hassabis built simulation games like Theme Park before he co-founded DeepMind, and he has said publicly that games are the perfect training ground for AI.

My thesis: video games are the most underestimated infrastructure in artificial intelligence today, and the EVE Online deal proves it. But there is a layer missing from the conversation, and DeepMind’s own research already points to it. Gameplay data captures what players do. It does not capture why. Without modeling player psychology, AI will hit a ceiling on its way to understanding any complex world, starting with virtual ones and ending with the real one.

The deal that just rewired AI’s training stack

On the surface, the Fenris Creations announcement reads like a typical management buyout. Pearl Abyss sold the studio back to its leadership for $120 million in cash and non-cash consideration. CCP rebranded as Fenris Creations, kept its studios in Reykjavík, London, and Shanghai, and confirmed there are no layoffs. The company closed 2025 with over $70 million in revenue, a record-breaking November, and the second-highest revenue quarter in EVE Online’s 20-year history. Two new titles are in development: EVE Vanguard, an extraction-adventure FPS, and EVE Frontier, an online space survival game.

The interesting part is what came next. Alongside the buyout, Fenris signed a research partnership with Google DeepMind. Google took a minority equity stake. DeepMind will work with an offline version of EVE Online running on a local server to test and evaluate models. The stated focus areas are revealing: long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning. These are three of the hardest open problems in AI. They are also three of the hardest problems EVE Online players have been solving every day for two decades.

EVE Online is famous for player-driven economies that rival small countries, for corporations that span continents, for wars that last years and involve tens of thousands of human participants. It is one of the only environments on the planet where you can study persistent, adversarial, multi-agent decision-making at scale. That is why DeepMind wanted in. Not because it is a game. Because it is, functionally, a synthetic civilization.

Why games have always been AI’s training ground

Gaming has been at the heart of every major DeepMind breakthrough. Atari DQN taught reinforcement learning to play 2D arcade games at superhuman levels. AlphaGo beat the world champion in a game with more board states than atoms in the universe. AlphaStar mastered StarCraft II, a real-time strategy game with imperfect information and long planning horizons. SIMA, DeepMind’s Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, learned to follow natural language instructions across multiple commercial 3D games.

Hassabis put it directly in the Fenris announcement: games are “the perfect training ground for developing and testing AI algorithms.” There are good reasons for this. Games provide closed environments with clear rules, dense feedback signals, and effectively unlimited episodes. They generate behavioral data orders of magnitude richer than what any internet scrape can produce. The best games push humans to the edge of their cognitive limits, which means an AI that can match human performance has, by definition, learned something hard.

Related posts that were previously published

Moufarek’s role at DeepMind is to operationalize this. Project Inception focuses on using gameplay data to advance Gemini’s capabilities for complex world creation. The thinking is straightforward. If you want AI to model the real world, train it on the most complex synthetic worlds humans have ever built. Train it on EVE Online, on Ubisoft’s open worlds, on the messy, multi-agent, long-horizon dynamics that no static dataset can capture.

For brand and strategy leaders, the implication is significant. The companies producing the richest behavioral data on Earth right now are not Big Tech platforms. They are gaming publishers. The most valuable data partnerships in AI over the next five years will look a lot more like Fenris-DeepMind than like the licensing deals we saw with publishing and media.

What EVE Online uniquely provides

EVE Online is interesting to DeepMind for one reason above all others. It is the closest thing we have to a stable, persistent, complex system where every meaningful decision is made by a human. There are no NPC factions running the economy. The cartels, the alliances, the heists, the betrayals, all of it comes from players. This produces behavioral patterns functionally equivalent to studying a real economy in miniature.

Consider what a single fleet engagement in EVE generates: spatial reasoning across thousands of units, real-time coordination among dozens of human commanders, deception about troop movements, negotiation with allied corporations, betrayal of long-standing pacts, and resource allocation decisions tied to in-game markets that respond to scarcity. All of this happens in a single session. Multiply it by 20 years of continuous operation, and you have the densest behavioral dataset on long-horizon human cooperation and conflict that exists outside of human history itself.

This is exactly the data DeepMind needs to make progress on planning, memory, and continual learning. A model trained on EVE has to figure out how to maintain coherent strategies across weeks of game time. It has to remember what it learned three engagements ago. It has to update its understanding when the meta shifts. These capabilities map directly onto the AGI roadmap.

The missing layer: player psychology

Here is where the conversation needs to evolve. Gameplay data captures actions. It captures positions, decisions, win rates, resource flows, and click patterns. What it does not naturally capture is the cognitive and emotional state that produced those actions.

Two players in EVE can take identical actions for completely different reasons. One is following a calculated long-term strategy. The other is acting out of frustration after losing a ship. The behavior looks the same. The decision-making process behind it is fundamentally different. Train AI only on the behavioral output and you teach it to mimic patterns. You do not teach it to understand intent.

This matters because intent is what generalizes. A model that knows why a player made a decision can predict what they will do in a situation it has never seen. A model that only knows what was done becomes brittle the moment context shifts. This is the same problem that has plagued recommendation engines, autonomous vehicles, and large language models for years. They are very good at predicting the next observable action. They are weak at modeling the human reasoning behind it.

For AI to move from pattern matching to genuine world understanding, it has to model the psychology of the actors in the world. Beliefs. Goals. Emotions. Risk tolerance. Trust. Memory of past interactions. The cognitive architecture that produces behavior, rather than just the behavior itself.

DeepMind’s own framework confirms this

What makes this argument concrete is that DeepMind has already articulated it themselves. In March 2026, the DeepMind research team published a paper titled “Measuring Progress Toward AGI: A Cognitive Framework.” It is one of the clearest documents I have seen on what the AGI roadmap actually looks like. The authors propose a Cognitive Taxonomy with 10 cognitive faculties an AGI system needs to demonstrate.

Eight of them are foundational: perception, generation, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, metacognition, and executive functions. Two are composite faculties that require multiple foundational abilities working together: problem solving and social cognition.

Social cognition, as the paper defines it, is “the ability to process and interpret social information and to respond appropriately in social situations.” It includes social perception (reading cues from facial expressions, tone, body language), theory of mind (reasoning about beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, and perspectives of others), and social skills (cooperation, negotiation, deception, persuasion).

The paper is explicit on the consequence of weakness in this area: “a system deficient in social understanding is likely to perform poorly in situations that involve complex interactions with people.”

That is the gap. EVE Online provides world-class data on long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning. It also happens to be one of the richest available environments for studying theory of mind, negotiation, deception, and cooperation at scale. Whether DeepMind taps into the social cognition layer of EVE, alongside the planning layer, will determine how useful this partnership ultimately is for AGI progress.

What this means for brand and strategy leaders

Three implications matter for executives reading this.

First, gaming IP is now strategic AI infrastructure. If your brand has equity in a gaming partnership, a virtual world, or a UGC platform, the underlying behavioral data is potentially more valuable than the in-game advertising or licensing economics. Treat the data as a balance sheet asset and evaluate it the way you would evaluate proprietary research.

Second, the next wave of AI partnerships will be psychological, not only behavioral. The companies that pair gameplay data with player psychology research, including motivation, identity, social dynamics, and emotional state, will produce models that understand humans rather than models that imitate them. If your category depends on understanding consumer intent at scale, this is the partnership pattern to track.

Third, this is a wake-up call for marketers and strategists who still think of AI as a content tool. The systems being trained on EVE Online today will eventually power the assistants, agents, and decision systems your customers interact with. The ones that succeed will understand why people make decisions, going well beyond simply tracking what they choose.

The Fenris Creations deal is a signal. The DeepMind cognitive framework is the strategy. Together, they mark the moment AI started taking psychology as seriously as it takes data.

What do you think? Is gameplay psychology the missing piece in the AGI roadmap, or is behavioral data alone enough? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is a publication for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders navigating the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. If this resonated, subscribe to get the next piece in your inbox.

Subscribe now

Sit with that for a second. The arena experience that anchors the cultural mythology of basketball reaches one fan in a hundred. The other 99 live with their teams somewhere else. Increasingly, that somewhere else is a video game.

I left the conference convinced that the conventional sports marketing playbook is being quietly retired. The new playbook treats games as the primary venue of fandom, treats athletes as full-time content partners, and treats commerce as a closed-loop function of the experience itself. Two iicon panels and a fresh report from EMARKETER, “From fan to cart: Why sports fandom has become a direct path to purchase,” put the architecture in plain view.

Sports fandom now lives where the brand and the league activate together, and games sit at the center of that activation. The brands building for this reality are turning fan emotion into measurable commerce, with new tools to close the loop from identification to purchase.

The NBA, 2K, and the Video Game as the League’s Living Room

The NBA and Take-Two’s 2K shared the iicon stage to talk about a partnership that has quietly become one of the most important brand-distribution channels in professional sports.

Crystal MacKenzie, VP of Global Marketing at NBA 2K, framed the strategic stakes plainly. For a huge share of the global fanbase, NBA 2K is the first touchpoint with the league. A teenager in Manila or São Paulo discovers Anthony Edwards through the controller, then graduates to highlight reels, jersey purchases, and live streams. The game is the gateway, and the gateway is wide.

That makes 2K’s authenticity obsession a strategic asset. The game strives to be the most accurate representation of the actual league, allowing fans to experience and identify with their teams and individual athletes. Player likenesses, signature moves, arena audio, broadcast presentation, all of it has to feel like the real thing. Authenticity earns the right to be the league’s facsimile.

O’Keeffe pointed to live service as the multiplier. In-game events, merchandise drops, and seasonal moments timed to the actual NBA calendar give the league an always-on amplification channel. When a marquee trade happens, 2K reflects it. When the All-Star Game arrives, the game runs themed events. The boundary between watching the league and playing the league is dissolving in real time.

The implication for brands is direct. If 99% of fans never see a live game, your activation strategy needs to reach them where they actually are. A 30-second TV spot during the playoffs is one channel. The video game where the same fan spends hundreds of hours a year is another, and it carries a fundamentally different relationship.

Adidas + Roblox: The Authenticity Test in Action

The Roblox-Adidas panel, featuring Phillip Waller, SVP of Brand Development and GM of Gaming, and Thomas Wehner, Head of Gaming, at Adidas, was the most operationally useful conversation I attended at iicon. It revealed how a global brand actually shows up in a gaming environment without alienating the audience.

Waller opened with two numbers that should be on every sports marketer’s wall. Kids spend an average of 2.5 hours per day on Roblox. And 45% of time spent on sports games inside Roblox happens outside the official season of the actual sport. Sports fandom in this environment is no longer seasonal, and it’s no longer bounded by the official calendar at all.

The structural choice Adidas made is worth studying. The company’s gaming division sits inside business development rather than marketing. Waller explained the reasoning at iicon: anchoring in business development gives the team flexibility on creative and production decisions, keeps them close to the consumer, and lets them experiment without the campaign timelines and KPIs that constrain a typical marketing function. That’s a structural insight most brands haven’t internalized.

His operating principle was direct. “If we can’t add value, we’re not doing it.” Adidas has declined a long list of publisher offers because the fit wasn’t right. The discipline of saying no is the discipline that earns credibility with players.

In the early phase, Adidas deliberately stayed away from heavy tracking. The goal was learning rather than optimizing. The team needed to understand the cultural grammar of the platform before measuring against it. As the work matured, the critical metric for Roblox activations became users’ willingness to spend in-game Robux currency on Adidas items. A free skin offers no signal of value. A paid skin proves the brand earned the consumer’s scarcest resource: their game economy.

Waller’s two pieces of advice for any brand thinking about gaming activation are worth remembering. First, connect your brand DNA to the DNA of the game. The activation has to feel native to the platform, the players, and the moment. Second, avoid building your own worlds from scratch unless you’re already in the world-building business. Learn first with smaller, lower-stakes projects, then scale what proves out and identify your best long-term fit inside gaming.

The Macro Picture: Athletes Have Become the Channel

The iicon insights snap into focus once you overlay them on the EMARKETER data. The report’s core finding is that individual athletes drive purchases that team loyalty alone cannot explain.

A YouGov survey of more than 900 US sports fans found that 25% have bought a team jersey primarily because of a specific athlete. Among 35-to-54-year-olds, the demographic with the most disposable income, that figure climbs to 28%. 10% of fans have bought merchandise for a team they don’t support because of a single player. 8% have purchased products specifically because an athlete recommended them.

Social media has accelerated the shift. 46% of US sports fans follow sports influencers, and the number jumps to 57% among Gen Z, per IBM data cited by EMARKETER. The economics are hard to argue with: NIL student-athletes are posting a 5.6% engagement rate, 3.7 times higher than the 1.9% rate of traditional influencers, according to Opendorse. College sports sponsorships now outperform Super Bowl ads in brand recall at a fraction of the cost. A college playoff ad runs around $2 million versus $8 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot, per Yahoo Sports.

The audience is enormous and concentrated. EMARKETER projects 164.7 million US fans will tune into live sports broadcasts in 2026, with the FIFA World Cup added to a packed Olympics year. The fan is reachable, the data is rich, and the conversion is closer than ever.

Commerce Media Is Closing the Loop

The most underappreciated shift in the EMARKETER report is the rise of sports-specific commerce media networks. Sports retailers are turning their first-party fan data into ad businesses, creating a category that didn’t exist five years ago.

Fanatics launched Fanatics Advertising in August 2025, with two ad networks running underneath it. The company posted $8.1 billion in revenue in 2024, up 15% year over year, with collectibles growing 40% to $1.6 billion, per Sportico. Jeremi Gorman, the former Netflix and Snap executive Fanatics hired as chief revenue officer, framed the value proposition pointedly: “Sponsoring a team is very expensive. Sponsoring a league is even more expensive. But that doesn’t mean brands don’t want to reach sports fans.” Non-endemic advertisers, brands that don’t sell on Fanatics, already account for the majority of the division’s revenue.

Dick’s Sporting Goods is running a similar play. The Dick’s Media network spans 850-plus stores across 47 states, with in-store media in its 100,000-square-foot House of Sport concept locations expanding to 50 by the end of 2026. The technology layer is what makes it more than a branding exercise. Radar and RFID track product pickups and visitor interactions, mapping them to sales. An Adidas campaign for the AE2 basketball shoe, endorsed by Anthony Edwards, used magnetic shelves to trigger nearby screens with Edwards content the moment a shopper picked up the shoe. 80% of Dick’s online orders fulfill from stores. 65% of 2024 sales came from omnichannel customers. The closed loop between in-store ad exposure and purchase is real.

The macro context: commerce media represented 19.5% of US digital ad spend in 2025 and is projected to reach 23.3% by 2029, per EMARKETER’s forecast. Sports-focused retailers with high-intent shoppers and rich first-party data are positioned to capture an outsized share.

What Brand and Strategy Leaders Should Do Now

Five operating principles emerge when you stack the iicon panels against the EMARKETER data.

Anchor your gaming work in business strategy rather than marketing campaigns. Adidas’s decision to house its gaming division inside business development is a structural choice with cultural consequences. It changes the time horizon, the metrics, and the cultural posture of the team. Brands that bolt gaming onto a marketing P&L will keep producing one-off activations that fail to compound.

Match brand DNA to game DNA before doing anything else. Waller’s principle protects the player relationship, and the player relationship is the entire asset. If your brand cannot bring genuine value into a world, stay out of that world.

Treat athletes as long-term content partners. The EMARKETER data is unambiguous: athletes drive purchase behavior more reliably than team loyalty does. NIL economics are turning college athletes into engagement engines that outperform traditional creators by 3.7x. The brands signing multi-year, content-led deals will compound advantage over time.

Use leagues and games as distribution. The NBA-2K relationship is a distribution channel for the league’s IP into 99% of its fanbase. A brand partnership inside that channel reaches a different fan, in a different mood, in a different transaction context than a courtside placement does.

Layer commerce media on top of every activation. Fanatics Advertising and the Dick’s Media network are turning fandom into measurable purchase intent. Non-endemic brands can now reach sports fans at the moment of purchase without paying for an official sponsorship. The cost of entry is lower, the measurement is sharper, and the loop closes inside the same shopping session.

The Real Stadium Has Already Moved

iicon 2026 made one thing inescapable. The center of gravity of sports fandom has shifted off the field and into the games, the feeds, the platforms, and the carts where fans actually live their relationship with the league.

99% of NBA fans never make it to a live game. 45% of Roblox sports gameplay happens off-season. Athletes drive purchase decisions that team loyalty alone cannot explain. Commerce media is on track to claim nearly a quarter of US digital ad spend.

The brands that build for this reality will own the next decade of sports fandom. Everyone else will keep paying more for less.

How is your brand thinking about the shift from stadium-and-broadcast to game-and-commerce? Where are you seeing the strongest signals of the new playbook? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is your front-row seat to the convergence of gaming, technology, and entertainment, written for the brand and strategy leaders shaping what comes next. If you found this useful, subscribe to get every issue delivered to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Make no mistake: this first edition has clear opportunities to evolve in future iterations. The foundation, however, is undeniable. From EA CEO Andrew Wilson taking the main stage to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk holding court, iicon 2026 already feels like a fixture on the calendar.

I had the privilege of delivering a keynote on my book Press Play, walking through how brands can seize the generational opportunity that video games represent. More on that toward the end. First, let me share what I took away from the conversations that defined the event.

Here’s the bigger picture: every major media, tech, and consumer business in the room is making the same bet at the same time. Gaming has become the connective tissue of the next decade of entertainment.

Andrew Wilson on the Golden Age of Entertainment

EA’s Andrew Wilson opened the conference with a thesis that framed the entire two days. “We live in the golden age of entertainment.” The world sits at a critical technological inflection point, and in his view, game developers and publishers “have to be deliberate about it.”

Wilson projects the global gamer population will reach 5 billion within the next decade. Think about that scale for a moment. More than half the humans alive will be gamers.

Scale is only half the story. Wilson’s vision for the future of entertainment centers on worlds built around IP, with multi-modal forms of content and engagement. Active consumption, passive consumption, social play, short form, long form. Each format has a reason to exist because each caters to a different consumer need at a different moment in their day.

For brands, the implication is clear. The battle has shifted from owning a single touchpoint to showing up across the full surface area of a fan’s relationship with a piece of IP.

Take-Two’s Strauss Zelnick on GTA VI and Brand Partnerships

The most anticipated entertainment release of the decade is still on track. Grand Theft Auto VI is set to launch in November this year, and Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was the most pressed executive at the event.

When asked when the marketing campaign would begin, Zelnick offered the kind of answer only he can deliver. “Soon.”

What he was willing to discuss: brand partnerships. Take-Two will be highly selective about which brands enter the GTA VI universe.

“We need to stay true to the underlying franchise and our players, because they have a sixth sense for when things are off.”

That sixth sense is the thing brands need to internalize. Players have been trained over decades to detect inauthentic intrusion. The bar for partnership in a franchise of this magnitude has never been higher.

Zelnick did open another door. Take-Two’s mobile arm Zynga is coming off a stellar year, and with mobile gaming remaining the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment business, Zynga is well positioned to accelerate by making it easy for brands to embed themselves in mobile titles. Watch this space closely.

Netflix Gaming: The Last Screen Becomes the First Screen

Netflix’s gaming strategy is the most misunderstood narrative in entertainment right now. After a couple of years of public skepticism, the company’s gaming GM Alain Tascan came to iicon to recalibrate the conversation.

Tascan was direct.

“We want to entertain the world. Without gaming, you can’t really fulfill that promise.”

His core insight: consumers increasingly demand convenience and seamless consumption. With Netflix reaching 800 million viewers globally, the strategic goal is to expand fandom through games.

Picture this scenario. You finish the season of your favorite Netflix show. The last screen of the show becomes the first screen of the video game built in that same universe. You stay inside the world. You keep creating, keep exploring, keep paying attention.

Netflix has a fresh batch of original games launching this year. The commitment is real, the budget is real, and the strategic thesis lines up with where consumer behavior is already heading.

Amazon Luna: The Ecosystem Play That Could Finally Land

Amazon arrived at iicon with a message about Luna, its re-released cloud gaming platform. Luna is being positioned as the connective hub between Twitch, Amazon Games, and Amazon Prime, opening cross-pollination of use cases across the Amazon entertainment stack.

The pattern matches what Netflix is building. You watched Invincible, and Luna serves you an offer to play the game. You streamed a Twitch broadcast, and Luna lets you jump into the same title with one click. Prime membership becomes the wrapper that ties it all together.

For brands accustomed to thinking about Amazon as a retail channel, this is a meaningful expansion. The company is building toward a single integrated entertainment ecosystem with games as the engagement engine.

Yahoo! Enters the Chat

I’ll admit it: Yahoo making a serious gaming push was not on my 2026 bingo card.

The numbers tell the story. Yahoo still reaches 250 million users per month. Younger audiences are flowing back to the brand, drawn in by nostalgia and a refreshed product surface. People come for email, news, and finance, and they stay for daily habits.

Games are a natural extension of those habits. Yahoo wants to increase engagement and reach new audiences through games. The early signal is promising: their puzzle title Crushable has seen 120% growth in its daily active user base since launch.

A new slate of original games arrives later this year. The audience is already there. The potential is real.

Press Play: Why Brands Cannot Afford to Sit This Out

In my keynote on Press Play, I left the room with a question I want to leave with you as well. If gaming is going to reach 5 billion people, sit at the center of every major streamer’s growth strategy, define how IP gets monetized, and become the connective tissue between Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and every major consumer platform, what is your brand’s position in that world?

The window for figuring this out is closing. The brands that engaged with gaming early, deliberately, and with genuine respect for player communities are now reaping the benefits. The brands still waiting for a clearer signal will find that the signal arrived years ago.

Gaming defines the strategic environment of the next decade. Treat it accordingly.

What This Means for Decision Makers

Five takeaways from iicon 2026 that should land on every CMO’s and brand strategy leader’s desk.

The gaming audience is reaching universal scale. A 5 billion player forecast within the decade demands repositioning at the C-suite level. Working-team curiosity will fall short.

IP-driven worlds are the emerging media format. Wilson, Tascan, Zelnick, and Amazon’s leadership all described the same architecture from different angles. The unit of strategy has shifted from titles to worlds, from campaigns to engagement loops.

Mobile is the fastest pathway in. Zynga’s brand integration roadmap will be one of the most important developments to watch in 2026 and 2027, especially for brands with shorter creative production cycles and direct-to-consumer ambitions.

Player authenticity is the price of entry. Take-Two’s partnership philosophy reflects the rule across the entire industry. The brands that win in gaming look and feel native to the worlds they enter.

Cross-platform ecosystems are crystallizing fast. Amazon, Netflix, and Yahoo are each building stacks where games anchor the engagement loop. The next 18 months will define which ecosystem strategies actually scale.

iicon 2026 was the first edition. Based on the conversations I had with executives across the industry, the next one is going to be unmissable.

What was your biggest takeaway from iicon, or what did you wish had been on the agenda? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is your front-row seat to the convergence of gaming, technology, and entertainment, written for the brand and strategy leaders shaping what comes next. If you found this useful, subscribe to get every issue delivered to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Games are still an afterthought. They shouldn’t be.

The gap between where consumers actually spend their time and where brand leaders deploy their budgets is now the single largest strategic blind spot in modern marketing. And that gap is widest in mobile gaming.

The report from EMARKETER and Admazing, published last month, lays out the disconnect in numbers that should make every marketing leader uncomfortable. I’ve been writing about the gaming opportunity for years. This study finally puts the math on the table. It shows marketing leaders still haven’t got the memo.

The 27-12-10 Problem

Let me give you three numbers that, placed side by side, tell the whole story of why most brands are behind the eight ball on gaming.

First: 26.9%. That is the share of total US media ad spend going to social networks in 2026, according to EMARKETER. Out of $463.93 billion in projected total US media ad spend this year, roughly $124.88 billion is headed to Meta, TikTok, X, Snap, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Second: 12.5%. That is the share of total time consumers spend on social platforms relative to all their media consumption. EMARKETER expects that gulf to widen.

Third: 10.2%. That is the percentage of marketers who say their organizations regularly use mobile gaming for brand campaigns. One in ten. The other nine sit somewhere on a spectrum of inaction: 37.0% rarely consider it, 28.7% deprioritize it in planning, and over a third of B2B/B2C marketers neither use nor actively consider mobile gaming at all.

Put those three numbers together and the picture is clear. Brands are allocating more than double their audience’s actual attention share to social. They are leaving the channel where the audience increasingly lives almost completely alone.

More than half of the US population, 54.4% according to EMARKETER’s October 2025 forecast, will be a mobile phone gamer in 2026. Mobile gaming is a mass medium. It reaches more Americans than Netflix. More than the NFL. More than any single social platform.

Only 2.1% of total digital ad spend is flowing to it.

Why Brand Leaders Keep Missing This

I have had versions of this conversation with dozens of CMOs, brand directors, and heads of strategy over the past year, at Cannes, at Advertising Week, in private client workshops. The reasons brand leaders stay on the sidelines fall into three categories, and each of them has become outdated.

The first is perception. A lingering assumption, rooted in the early 2010s, pictures gamers as a narrow demographic of young men playing hardcore console titles. That picture has been wrong for at least a decade. Candy Crush, Royal Match, Coin Master, Roblox, and Monopoly Go pulled mobile gaming into the mainstream. Yory Wurmser, Principal Analyst at EMARKETER, put it plainly in the report: “Most people in this country are gamers, as are the majority of internet users worldwide.”

The second is historical measurement weakness. This one had teeth. When Apple rolled out iOS 14.5 in 2021 and deprecated the IDFA, the mobile gaming ad ecosystem effectively had its tracking infrastructure cut off at the knees. Attribution, audience signals, and campaign measurement all took a hit. For two or three years, even marketers who wanted to lean into gaming struggled to prove it worked.

The third is budgetary inertia. Media mix decisions are rarely made from scratch. Last year’s plan becomes this year’s starting point, and social and CTV are already locked into the template. Gaming stays out of the conversation because it was out of last year’s conversation. Only 28.7% of marketers even consider mobile gaming alongside core channels, per the EMARKETER/Admazing survey. The rest treat it as optional, experimental, or invisible.

All three of those reasons have collapsed.

The Measurement Argument Is Over

The biggest structural objection to mobile gaming was always measurement. That objection has been retired.

Last year, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released its Gaming Measurement Framework, giving the industry its first standardized benchmarks for in-game ads, rewarded ads, and interstitial ads. Kantar, Circana, DISQO, and the MRC-accredited measurement vendors have all invested heavily in gaming-specific brand lift and outcomes lift methodologies. The ecosystem has matured.

The results these new tools are producing should stop any skeptical marketing leader in their tracks. Pedro Sánchez López, Senior Director of Brand and Media at Kantar, shared a stat in the EMARKETER report that deserves to be printed on a poster in every CMO’s office: mobile gaming ad campaigns deliver purchase intent 3.5 times stronger than the US norm, with a 7.1 percentage point lift.

Three and a half times the purchase intent lift of the US norm. Let that sink in.

López also tracked a shift I have been seeing anecdotally for years. Consumer receptivity to gaming ads has moved from 25% in 2012 to 54% in 2025. The audience welcomes the ads, provided the ads fit the gameplay moment (the second part - authenticity - is crucial and something most brands get wrong).

Erika Digirolamo, Vice President of Media Solutions at Circana, framed the measurement evolution directly. Measurement quality in mobile gaming has moved from basic awareness and engagement metrics to reliably connecting ad exposure to incremental business outcomes. Circana, Kantar, Nielsen, and ComScore now measure mobile gaming with the same rigor they apply to CTV and linear television.

Attention quality, the metric that has become the new currency of brand media, is where mobile gaming outperforms. 86.1% of marketers in the EMARKETER/Admazing survey called attention quality at least moderately important. Mobile gaming, particularly rewarded video, is engineered for attention. The player opts in. The player receives value. The player watches. Rewarded ads landed as the top-performing format in the survey, with 40.7% of marketers naming it their most successful mobile gaming format.

AI Is Closing the Gap Faster Than Brands Are Catching Up

The measurement argument has closed. The creative argument is closing next.

Generative and agentic AI tools are collapsing the production cost of gaming-native creative. Historically, a brand that wanted to show up in a mobile game needed bespoke creative for playables, rewarded video, and interstitials. That investment made gaming feel like an expensive side quest for most marketing teams.

Eddy Prado, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Admazing, described the shift: “AI is helping mobile gaming align with the standards brand marketers expect: clearer measurement, faster creative iteration, and more disciplined budget allocation.” Wurmser echoed the point from the EMARKETER side. Dynamic creative is getting better and cheaper, and personalization at scale has arrived.

Pair that with what AI is doing on the game development side. Studios are shipping more finely tuned titles faster, which means more inventory. More inventory with better targeting and dynamic creative produces a flywheel. The early brands to scale up their gaming buys are about to have a compounding advantage over the ones still treating the channel as experimental.

The Leaders Are Already In

Some brand leaders are already on the right side of this curve. Wendy’s has spent years building presence inside Fortnite and Twitch, showing up where their Gen Z audience actually is. Walmart and Nike launched experiences inside Roblox that reached tens of millions of young shoppers. Hasbro has leaned into Monopoly Go as a billion-dollar IP extension. Mattel licensed Barbie into Roblox and mobile titles ahead of the movie launch. Chipotle, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, and Stanley have all run in-game campaigns in the past 18 months, and the measurement reports coming out of those campaigns are what is driving the renewed conversations I am having in boardrooms this year.

Your Game Plan, If You Run Marketing at a Consumer Brand

If you are running marketing, brand, or strategy at a meaningful consumer-facing business, here is what I would do this quarter.

1. Audit your media mix against actual consumer attention. If your share of spend on social exceeds your target audience’s share of time on social by more than 10 percentage points, you have a misallocation problem. Name it and fix it.

2. Carve out an incrementality test budget for mobile gaming, somewhere between 3% and 5% of your digital spend. Leverage tools like Solsten to understand what mobile games your target audience already plays, and how to best show up this in those environments. Partner with a measurement provider like Kantar, Circana, or Nielsen to run a proper brand lift and outcomes lift study against your existing social and CTV buys.

3. Prioritize rewarded video and playable formats for your first wave. They carry the attention quality and creative flexibility that travel cleanly from your existing brand campaigns. Depending on your games of choice, pick a partner. Overwolf and Superleague Gaming are great options.

4. Build an AI-native creative pipeline for gaming. If you are still commissioning gaming creative the way you commissioned a TV spot in 2015, you are leaving the compounding returns on the table. Lean into tools like Elaris that has helped brand leaders increase conversion rates for in-game ads by up to 50%.

The brands that move in 2026 will establish a beachhead before mobile gaming ad inventory gets repriced upward. The ones that wait will pay more for the same audience in 2028.

The disconnect between where consumers spend their time, attention, and dollars, and where brand leaders deploy their budgets, has become indefensible. The data is on the table. The measurement tools are in the market. The audience is waiting inside the games.

The question isn’t whether brands need to shift their budgets to gaming. The question is who will move the fastest and with the most conviction.

Are you meeting your consumers where they actually are, or are you still pouring budget into the platforms that dominated last decade’s media plan? What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is a weekly briefing on how gaming, technology, and entertainment are reshaping brand strategy for decision-makers at the world’s biggest brands. Next week, I’ll be giving a keynote at the iicon conference, where top executives across gaming, entertainment, sports, and brands come together to shape the world of consumer engagement. I’ll be sharing important insights from behind closed doors - so be sure to subscribe below to not miss out.

Subscribe now

Gaming is destroying this assumption in real time.

That’s the opportunity. But there’s a version of the gaming opportunity that brands keep misreading, and I’ve watched some very smart marketing leaders spend very significant budgets on it. Getting this right requires understanding not just why gaming works, but exactly where the current conventional approach breaks down.

Gaming offers something no other medium has ever managed: genuine intimacy at scale. But only if you build it the right way.

What Gaming Does That No Other Medium Can

Start with a question that sounds simple but isn’t: what is the difference between watching a Travis Scott concert and attending one?

In April 2020, 12.3 million people were simultaneously inside Fortnite for his Astronomical event, a Guinness World Record for the largest music concert in a video game. Across all five time-zone-staggered showings, 45.8 million players experienced it. By any traditional media metric, this is a broadcast event. The numbers dwarf most television audiences for live music.

Ask anyone who was there, inside the game rather than watching a stream, and they will describe it the way they describe being somewhere, not watching something. They had a squad. They had a position in the world. When the sky turned inside out and Scott’s giant avatar moved through the landscape, they were moving too. The camera was not fixed. The perspective was theirs.

This is the quality that makes gaming categorically different as a brand medium: it places people in a state of play, and in a state of play, human beings are cognitively and emotionally present in a way that passive consumption cannot replicate. The neuroscience is well-established. Play engages agency, identity, and reward circuits simultaneously. When a brand enters a gaming environment, it becomes part of the world the player is inhabiting.

That is why the Travis Scott event felt intimate despite its scale. That is why Balenciaga’s Fortnite collection launch generated genuine fashion press, not gaming press. That is why Nike’s in-game sneakers are coveted rather than ignored. The brand arrives as something you wear, use, or experience in a context of self-expression and identity. The interaction is personal, mediated by play, even when millions of others are doing the same thing simultaneously.

Scale and intimacy are not a trade-off in gaming. They are features of the same architecture.

Why the Default Approach Is Failing Brands

Here is where I need to be direct, because I think the current standard approach to gaming is producing cautionary tales rather than competitive advantages.

The most common first move for an enterprise brand entering gaming right now is to build an experience on Roblox. I understand why. Roblox has a young, engaged audience, the barrier to entry is relatively low, the press coverage of brand activations is reliable, and it feels like being in the right place at the right time. For some objectives, it makes sense.

But I have spoken directly with a marketing leader at a global beauty brand who told me something that every CMO considering this path should hear. They spent $200,000 on a Roblox integration. When it launched, they received virtually no data from Roblox on who engaged with it, how they engaged, where they came from, or what happened next. Some brand awareness metrics moved. Beyond that, the learnings were nearly zero. The investment, in terms of actionable intelligence about their audience, returned almost nothing.

This is structural, not an execution failure. As Digiday has reported extensively, the lack of third-party measurement on Roblox has been a persistent and growing problem for advertisers, with agency executives finding it increasingly difficult to convince new brands to invest without independent verification of results. Roblox offers first-party data from its own ad server, but there is no Nielsen, no Comscore, no external validation of what the platform claims about your outcomes.

The aggregation trap I described in Part One of this series applies inside gaming too. Roblox needs brands to make its platform feel culturally alive and commercially credible. Sharing meaningful audience data with those brands would reduce their platform dependency. So it doesn’t. The incentives are identical to every other platform aggregator, even if the medium is different.

In case you missed it - Parts One and Two in this series

The beauty brand’s $200,000 bought them a presence. It did not buy them knowledge. And without knowledge, there is no compounding value, no ability to reach those players again, no understanding of who they were, no data to inform the next decision.

What Sega Understands About This Problem

I recently spoke with an executive at Sega, the company behind one of gaming’s most enduring cultural properties: Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic commands genuine love across generations, an IP with the kind of authentic resonance that most brands spend decades and enormous budgets trying to manufacture.

And yet, from a distribution standpoint, Sega faces a version of the same trap that every brand building on third-party platforms faces. Their games live on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. Their relationship with fans is mediated by platform holders who set the terms of discovery, pricing, and access. The IP is exceptional. The ownership of the audience relationship is not.

“IP without distribution is a rented asset. You can build something genuinely beloved and still find yourself dependent on someone else’s willingness to let you reach the people who love it.”

This is the paradox the gaming industry itself is grappling with. It illuminates exactly the right question for any brand operating in this space: what does it mean to own a relationship with your audience, and what are you actually building toward if you don’t?

A Portfolio Framework That Actually Works

Based on my work advising enterprise brands on gaming strategy, here is the framework I believe produces the best outcomes. It is deliberately a portfolio approach, not a single bet.

The first move is to experiment on third-party platforms including Roblox, but with clear-eyed expectations and a data strategy built into the commercial agreement before you sign anything. Negotiate what data you will receive, in what format, and with what frequency. If a platform will not commit to meaningful data sharing in the contract, that tells you something important about the nature of the relationship you are entering. This is not necessarily a reason to walk away, but it is a reason to calibrate your investment accordingly and to be honest internally about what success looks like when learning is structurally constrained.

The second move, and this is where most enterprise brands are significantly underinvesting, is to partner with established mobile game publishers who already have the audience you want to reach. Mobile gaming reaches more people than console and PC combined. Unlike Roblox or Fortnite, a partnership with a mobile game publisher can be structured as a commercial deal where data access is a negotiable term. You are agreeing to terms, not accepting platform defaults. That distinction is significant. It means you can require, as a condition of the partnership, that you receive player data that makes the investment meaningful: purchase intent signals, cohort behaviour, retention patterns. The kind of intelligence that tells you whether your brand changed anything, not just whether people saw it.

The third move is the most strategically important, and the one that most directly addresses the aggregation problem: use your own brand and IP to build games or gamified content for the audiences you already reach. This is a call to stop treating games as someone else’s medium and start treating your brand as the platform. If you have an existing direct audience through email, through loyalty programmes, through owned communities, you have the foundation for a gaming experience that you control, that generates data you own, and that deepens relationships with people already invested in your brand. The intimacy is real because the relationship pre-exists the game. The data is yours because you built the environment.

This is the thread connecting back to the broader series argument. The brands that escape the aggregation trap are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that recognise their existing owned audience as the most valuable starting point, and invest in deepening those relationships through experiences that cannot be intermediated by anyone else.

The Standard Every Brand Should Hold Itself To

Gaming represents one powerful expression of something more fundamental: the shift from renting attention to building relationships. The brands that understand gaming understand this instinctively, because gaming makes it impossible to hide behind impression counts and reach metrics. Either the player is engaged, actively, willingly, on their own terms, or they are not.

That standard: genuine, chosen engagement from an audience that knows what it is doing when it shows up, is the standard every brand should hold its entire distribution strategy to. In games. In everything.

The platform trap is real. The acquisition playbook, as I described in Part Two, is available at various scales to anyone willing to think structurally about distribution. The intimacy at scale that gaming demonstrates is achievable. But only if you build it the right way, own the data that comes from it, and resist the temptation to confuse a presence on someone else’s platform for a relationship of your own.

Are you applying the same scrutiny to your gaming investments that you would apply to any other major marketing commitment? What would your data tell you if you asked? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers business strategy at the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. This is Part Three of a three-part series on brand distribution, audience ownership, and the future of the attention economy. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe below to get every future issue directly.

Subscribe now

In case you missed it - Part One of Three

The natural response to that argument is: fine, so what does the alternative actually look like?

The answer is becoming clearer, and it looks less like a content strategy and more like an acquisition strategy. The most strategically sophisticated organisations operating right now are buying direct lines to audiences that no platform can intermediate. They are purchasing the doorway, not just what’s behind it.

Three organisations have demonstrated this clearly, across three different industries, with three very different acquisition targets. The logic underneath all of them is identical.

Case Study One: The New York Times Buys a Daily Ritual

When the New York Times acquired Wordle in January 2022 for a price reported to be in the low seven figures, the coverage largely framed it as a quirky cultural moment. A newspaper, struggling with the existential pressures facing legacy media, buys a word game that had gone viral. The strategic significance was largely missed.

What the Times purchased was not a game. It was a daily ritual shared by tens of millions of people who had never previously had a reason to visit a New York Times product. Wordle gave the company something that subscription marketing cannot buy and advertising cannot manufacture: habitual, direct contact with a new audience at a moment of their day when they were already engaged, already open, and already forming a behavioural pattern around the experience.

The strategic sequel is the more important part of this story. Wordle became the entry point to a broader Times Games ecosystem, alongside Connections, Spelling Bee, and the Mini Crossword, that has become a powerful engine for subscription conversion. The Times is selling a daily habit that, over time, makes the broader Times offering feel indispensable. They built a conversion funnel by buying a ritual.

The platform cannot disintermediate that. There is no algorithm between the Times and its puzzle player. The relationship is direct, daily, and owned. It’s been the most powerful driver of digital revenue growth and subscriber stickiness for the Times that I dedicated an entire section to them in my book on gaming strategies for brands.

Case Study Two: OpenAI Buys a Voice in the Conversation

OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN, announced in April 2026, looks unusual on the surface. An artificial intelligence laboratory buying a daily tech talk show. The strategic logic becomes obvious once you stop thinking about TBPN as media and start thinking about it as distribution infrastructure for narrative control.

OpenAI is operating in the middle of one of the most contested reputation battles in the history of technology: a fight over what artificial general intelligence means, who benefits from it, who is harmed by it, and who should be trusted to build it. Every major publication, every tech commentator, every YouTube channel with an opinion has a platform from which to shape that narrative. Before TBPN, OpenAI had to rely on earned coverage, which means relying on editors, journalists, and algorithm decisions made by platforms it doesn’t control.

TBPN changes that. The show generated approximately $5 million in advertising revenue in 2025 and was on track to exceed $30 million this year, according to reporting from TechCrunch. That tells you something significant about the audience’s size and quality. More importantly, it gives OpenAI a direct audio channel into the ears of the founder and operator class that shapes tech culture. No editorial filter. No algorithm. No platform that could bury or amplify coverage based on its own commercial incentives.

“Narrative is a competitive asset. Relying on third-party media to carry your story is a form of distribution risk.”

This move echoes something Andreessen Horowitz has been building systematically for years. a16z has constructed a media infrastructure: podcasts, newsletters, and a media fellowship that trained 65 storytellers in its inaugural cohort, with a second cohort launching in April 2026. The goal is direct access to an audience of founders and operators who subscribe. If a16z’s views on tech regulation, AI, or cryptocurrency are filtered through a reporter who frames them differently, that is a loss. If they publish directly to the people who matter to their business, that is leverage.

This is a distribution ownership strategy wearing media’s clothes. The distinction matters.

Case Study Three: Disney Buys a World

The most ambitious articulation of this thesis involves two of the most recognisable names in entertainment.

In February 2024, Disney invested $1.5 billion to acquire an equity stake in Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, and announced a multiyear partnership to build what they described as an “expansive and open games and entertainment universe.” On paper, this looks like a content deal: Disney IP inside an Epic platform. Marvel characters in Fortnite. Star Wars experiences. Avatar activations. That reading is too narrow.

Fortnite has over 300 million registered users and a cultural gravity that makes it a persistent social space, somewhere people inhabit regularly and with genuine emotional investment. Unreal Engine is the infrastructure layer powering a growing proportion of interactive entertainment globally. Epic Online Services provides identity, social graph, and cross-platform connectivity for millions of players across dozens of titles.

Disney, meanwhile, owns the most powerful IP portfolio in the history of entertainment (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Disney Animation, Avatar) and distributes it almost entirely through platforms and theatres it doesn’t control. Disney+ is the closest thing to owned distribution the company has, and it has faced sustained commercial pressure as the streaming wars have matured. In cinemas, in streaming, in social media: Disney is a content creator dependent on aggregators for reach.

The Epic stake changes that strategic frame. Follow the logic of this partnership to its conclusion, and you arrive at a scenario where Disney owns the interactive world that hundreds of millions of people inhabit. A persistent digital environment where the next generation of fans grows up alongside Disney IP as something they do, rather than something they watch.

That is the escape from aggregation at its most complete. Disney would own the platform where the relationship between its characters and the next generation of fans is formed. No streaming deal. No algorithm. No theatrical window to negotiate.

Why Disney Should Acquire Epic Games

The Common Thread

Three case studies, three different industries, three very different acquisition targets. The logic underneath all of them is identical.

Wordle is a daily ritual. TBPN is a direct audio channel into the founder class. Fortnite is a persistent social world with 300 million registered users. None of these can be intermediated by a third-party platform. None of them can be algorithmically deprioritised. None of them can have their reach revised downward in the next quarterly update.

What all three organisations did was stop thinking about distribution as a function of content strategy and start thinking about it as infrastructure. The question they asked was not about creative quality or channel mix. It was this: what do we need to own in order to reach the people we want to reach, without asking anyone’s permission?

That question is available to every brand to ask. The answer will look different depending on your category, your audience, and your resources. But the framing is universal. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that understood, early enough, that the platform is the prize.

The next question is obvious: what does this look like when you don’t have $1.5 billion to spend on a games company? That’s the third piece.

Where does acquisition-led distribution thinking fit inside your organisation’s strategy today? Is it even a conversation at the leadership level? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers business strategy at the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe below to get every issue directly.

This is Part Two of a three-part series on brand distribution, audience ownership, and the future of the attention economy. Subscribe today to receive the entire series straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

I’ve spent years working with some of the world’s most recognised brands on their audience and distribution strategies. The single most dangerous misconception I encounter is the belief that building an audience on a platform is the same as owning one. It isn’t. And if the events of the last few years haven’t made that clear, the next few years will.

The follower count is a dependency, owned entirely by someone else, on terms set by someone else. And those terms can change overnight.

“The greatest trick platforms ever pulled was convincing brands that reach was the same as relationship.”

What Your Social Following Actually Is

Let me be direct about what your Instagram following actually is. It is a list of people who, at some point, pressed a button on a platform that doesn’t belong to you. They receive your content at a frequency the platform decides, in a format the platform chooses, delivered to a percentage of them the platform controls. You have zero obligation from the platform to tell you who they are, what they want, or where they go when they leave.

You are borrowing a relationship, on terms set by someone else.

Those terms have changed overnight. Repeatedly. Facebook’s organic reach collapsed from roughly 16% in 2012 to under 6% by 2014, a change that wiped out years of audience-building investment for thousands of brands in a single algorithm update. TikTok’s ban scare in early 2025 was a different kind of wake-up call. For a few days, brands with millions of followers confronted a very simple question: if this platform disappears tomorrow, how do I reach these people? The answer, for almost every brand, was the same. They couldn’t. Because they didn’t have email addresses. They didn’t have phone numbers. They had a follower count, and follower counts are not portable.

This is a structural feature of how these platforms are designed to work. It is not an oversight.

Why the Trap Is Built Into the Business Model

In 2015, technology strategist Ben Thompson published what has become one of the most useful frameworks for understanding how digital platforms accumulate power. He called it Aggregation Theory.

The core argument: in the internet era, the companies that win are the ones that control demand rather than supply. Aggregators (Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon) win by owning the consumer relationship. Once they have that, suppliers, meaning anyone who needs access to those consumers, have no choice but to come to the platform on the platform’s terms. Over time, aggregators can commoditise and replace those suppliers, because any individual supplier is replaceable. The aggregator is not.

Brands are the suppliers in this framework. Every time you invest in growing an audience on someone else’s platform, you are deepening your dependency on an aggregator with no structural incentive to treat you as a partner.

Consider the information asymmetry in practice. TikTok knows which of your followers are 24-year-old women in Manchester who watch beauty content late at night and are in the market for a new moisturiser. They know when those people churn, who they follow instead, what competitor content they engage with. You know your follower count and your average view duration. That gap is not incidental. It is the source of the platform’s entire business model.

The Relationship Was Always Adversarial

The most persistent aspect of this dynamic is that it is disguised as cooperation. Platforms actively court brands. They hold conferences, publish case studies, offer managed service teams. They want your content because it attracts and retains users. They want your ad spend because it funds their business. They need you.

Needing you and sharing power with you are entirely different things. As Thompson noted in his follow-up analysis, suppliers to aggregators face a fundamental structural problem: even when aggregators genuinely depend on them, the aggregator’s control of the consumer interface means suppliers can be played off against each other. There is always another brand willing to create content. There is always another advertiser willing to buy reach.

The platform’s data moat is the product. The incentive for a platform to share meaningful audience data with you is structurally negative. If you understood your audience deeply enough to reach them directly, you would need the platform less. That is precisely why you don’t get that data.

The Measurement Problem Is Getting Worse

What makes this dynamic increasingly urgent is that the platforms’ data advantage is compounding faster than most brands’ ability to respond. As AI-mediated discovery grows through tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews, a new layer of aggregation is forming that is even more opaque than social media.

On Instagram or TikTok, a brand can maintain a presence, publish content, and build a following. In AI-mediated search, there is no profile page. There is no follower count. There is either relevance or invisibility, determined by systems you cannot see and cannot directly influence.

The brands that spent a decade optimising for search, building content libraries and SEO strategies, are watching organic traffic collapse as AI answers replace link clicks. One platform dependency was traded for another, and now that second dependency is being eroded by a third.

The Question Every Brand Needs to Answer Now

I am not arguing that brands should abandon social platforms or stop investing in reach. These channels have genuine value and, for many categories, represent the most efficient way to grow awareness at scale. The error is treating them as a destination rather than a funnel, and confusing rented audience with owned audience.

The question every brand needs to sit with is this: if the three platforms you rely on most changed their algorithm, raised their ad prices by 40%, or disappeared tomorrow, what would you have left? What direct relationships do you own? What data do you hold? Who can you reach without asking someone else’s permission?

Most brands, if they answer honestly, will find the answer unsettling. And that unsettling feeling is worth something. Because the brands figuring this out are not waiting for the next platform shock to motivate them. They are taking structural action now, acquiring the means of distribution itself.

That is what the next piece is about - brands that are buying the doorway to reduce their dependency on these platforms.

Have you done an honest audit of what audience you truly own, versus what you are renting? What did you find? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers business strategy at the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe below to get every issue directly.

This is Part One of a three-part series on brand distribution, audience ownership, and the future of the attention economy. Subscribe today to receive the entire series straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

March 24: Epic Games announced it was laying off 1,000 people alongside a transformation program that aims to realize an additional $500 million in cost savings. Epic is making these deep cuts amid lackluster engagement numbers in its flagship game Fortnite. Still, for a company that has been known for loose budgets and spending habits, this marks a remarkable shift in execution and fiscal responsibility - something Epic Games’ investor base will certainly appreciate. Which brings us to Disney.

Later the same day: OpenAI announced it would refocus all of its efforts on code and the performance of its core models. In other words: Anthropic is running away from us. No more playtime for. That led to the company shutting down its Sora application, for which Disney had signed a $1 billion deal. The team around Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro waited seven days, until March 31, to cancel its deal with OpenAI and pull back.

In a span of seven days, the worlds of gaming and entertainment seemed to have been turned upside down. It felt like someone shook the snow globe so hard that the scenery resembled an Arctic storm more than a peaceful winter wonderland. Now that the “snow” is starting to settle and clarity is taking over, a new possible reality emerged that I have been advocating for a long time.

Disney is rumored to be contemplating an acquisition of Epic Games.

Finally.

An opportunity this compelling for both sides in a transaction rarely comes around.

I have spoken to people on the inside of both companies over the past week, as well as industry insiders close to them. These are more than rumors - Disney is seemingly actively evaluating a potential deal to buy Epic Games. Given the recent layoffs and challenging performance, any deal will certainly come in below Epic Games’ $32 billion peak valuation exactly four years ago, as well as its $22.5 billion valuation when Disney invested $1.5 billion in February 2024. Disney’s current market cap hovers around the $175 billion mark. Its stock price is on the same level where it was 11 years ago. Meanwhile Netflix’s stock price jumped from roughly $6 to $99 in the same period.

Disney needs a transformational event - buying Epic Games can be just that.

Here’s why I love this deal for Disney.

A Consistent Customer Journey That Connects Physical And Digital

Owning Epic Games gives Disney the ability to stretch its IP portfolio across the entire consumer journey and embed themselves along a key consumer passion point - gaming - to be always-on and always in direct engagement with consumers. Where the Parks business is the cash cow, it is a bigger barrier and cost to the consumer to access those. Worlds within Fortnite significantly reduce that barrier while increasing the monetization potential. CEO Josh D’Amaro has already revealed his intention to release new movies inside of Fortnite. The Simpsons collaboration and orchestrated rollout showed us what the future of transmedia looks like. Owning Epic Games and its flagship games gives Disney more than the ability to own video games - it would own one of the most culturally relevant real-estate and distribution channels on the planet.

Previously released articles related to this topic

Strengthening Disney’s Flywheel

Disney refers to its flywheel a lot, where digital engagement acts as a leading indicator and driver for its parks revenue. Former CEO Bob Iger described Disney+ as the portal to its parks. In 2025, Disney reported record operating income of $10 billion for its parks, which management attributed to stronger demand driven by its digital engagement and the success of digital-native franchises in physical spaces. Fortnite gives Disney a lean-in medium as opposed to streaming, which is a lean-back medium. The intensified engagement from Disney-themed Fortnite worlds will very likely translate to more streaming engagement as well as greater park revenue - considering that BCG reports an 86% conversion rate from purchases in gaming environments to physical purchases.

Intensifying Already High Consumer Passion

Disney’s NPS in early 2026 was reported at 38, significantly outperforming other media companies. Its parks perform even better at 49. Last year, 7 out of the 10 most-watched streaming shows in the US were Disney properties. Estimates have 60-80% of Gen Alpha engaging with Disney content daily. The consumer passion is strong. The ability to co-create inside gaming environments and leverage your favorite Disney characters inside Fortnite - or build part of a new park yourself - will only intensify the already strong connection consumers have to the brand. This is the playbook Disney wanted to roll out with OpenAI via its Sora app. Fortnite comes with the tools and the ecosystem for user-generated content to turn this on day one.

Building Its Digital Laboratory

Athleisure giant Adidas considers video games as their digital warehouse. A way to test new concepts at scale at very low cost and significantly shorten the supply chain and associated risks of production. For Disney, the stakes are even higher. The new Space Mountain in Tokyo Disneyland is set to cost roughly $460 million, making it one of the most expensive attractions Walt Disney Imagineering has ever created. Imagine you invest all this money to launch a new ride and have it flop. In Fortnite, Disney can create new rides and attractions at almost no marginal cost, track and understand consumer engagement in real-time, iterate on the concept - and green light it for production in the physical world when the risk of failure is practically zero.

The Risks Disney Can’t Ignore

No acquisition of this scale comes without friction. Disney’s track record with large deals is mixed. Pixar and Marvel were transformational successes. The Fox acquisition was far more complicated. Integrating a gaming company requires organizational muscle Disney has not yet built. The cultures are different, the talent expectations are different, and the speed of iteration required in gaming runs at a pace that large entertainment companies are structurally not designed for.

Epic Games’ valuation is still a negotiation. Even discounted from its peak, a deal of this size represents a meaningful portion of Disney’s $175 billion market cap. D’Amaro and his board will need to make a compelling case to shareholders that the strategic value justifies the premium.

And then there is Tim Sweeney. Epic’s founder and CEO has built one of the most influential companies in gaming with a clear vision and a willingness to fight his battles publicly - he took Apple to court over App Store fees and kept going for years. Sweeney’s continued involvement will be a defining factor in any transaction. Structuring a deal that retains his energy and creative ambition is as important as getting the price right.

What This Means for Brands

If this deal closes, it fundamentally reshapes how brands access gaming audiences. Right now, Fortnite brand deals go through Epic Games. A Disney-owned Fortnite changes the economics and the creative expectations. Brands that want access to Fortnite’s 80 million monthly active users will be negotiating with Disney’s brand partnerships team - a team that knows how to protect IP equity and will price access accordingly.

The bigger shift is strategic. Disney acquiring Epic does not just change who you negotiate with. It redefines what gaming means as a brand marketing channel. Disney’s IP management discipline combined with Fortnite’s cultural reach creates a new tier of branded entertainment. Think less “promotional activation inside a game” and more “co-authored cultural moment at global scale.”

The brands building genuine gaming competencies right now - that understand how to show up authentically in interactive environments and have a point of view on what their brand means inside a game world - will have a significant head start when this consolidation reshapes access and pricing. Passive observers will be paying premium rates for whatever inventory Disney decides to make available. Active participants will already have built the muscle.

The window to experiment cheaply and build fluency in gaming is still open. It will not stay that way much longer.

What do you think? Is a Disney acquisition of Epic Games the transformational deal both companies need, or does integrating a gaming giant into an entertainment empire create more risk than reward? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers business strategy at the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment - for the decision-makers shaping what comes next. Subscribe below to get every issue directly in your inbox.

Subscribe now

Niantic just revealed something that should fundamentally change how every executive thinks about the gaming industry.

The company behind Pokémon Go — the AR game that had 500 million people installing it in 60 days — sold its gaming division to Scopely last year. At the same time, it spun out a new AI company called Niantic Spatial. That company took the 30 billion images Pokémon Go players captured while hunting Pikachus across cities on every continent, and used them to build a world model that can pinpoint a location to within centimeters — without GPS. That model is now being used to help delivery robots navigate the real world.

This is not a pivot story. It is a harvest story.

Niantic built a game, deployed hundreds of millions of humans as data collectors, understood the built environment of cities at a scale no mapping company had achieved, and then sold the game when it had extracted what it needed. AppLovin did the same thing on a different axis. It built mobile games to study the relationship between ads, conversion funnels, and player behavior with a granularity no advertising platform could match from the outside. Once that intelligence was baked into its targeting algorithm, it sold the game studios to TripleDot.

To anyone who has spent real time in the gaming industry, this pattern is familiar. Games have always been the place where the hardest problems get solved first — because the stakes are low enough to iterate aggressively and the performance requirements are brutal enough to force real breakthroughs.

The question for decision makers is not whether this has happened before. It has, repeatedly, across hardware, software, behavioral science, and economics. The question is what gaming is building right now that the rest of the world will be running on in five years.

The GPU: Gaming’s Accidental Gift to AI

The most consequential technology transfer in modern history started with a graphics chip.

In 1999, NVIDIA released the GeForce 256, the first GPU specifically designed to handle the mathematical load of rendering 3D game worlds. The architecture was built for parallelism — thousands of small cores performing identical operations simultaneously rather than a few powerful cores doing tasks in sequence. The gaming industry needed this to render realistic environments at playable frame rates. What it created, without knowing it, was the foundational hardware for artificial intelligence.

The mathematics of 3D rendering — matrix multiplication, vector calculus — is identical to the mathematics of training neural networks. When researchers ran an image recognition model on two consumer NVIDIA gaming cards in 2012, they crushed every existing benchmark. The hardware that had been running Call of Duty turned out to be more capable of machine learning than the world’s most expensive supercomputers. NVIDIA’s release of CUDA in 2007 had already unlocked GPU programming for non-graphical tasks, but that 2012 result made the strategic reality impossible to ignore.

By 2018, NVIDIA introduced Tensor Cores — originally designed to upscale low-resolution game images using AI — which became the specific hardware architecture needed to train the Transformer models that power every modern large language model. The efficiency gains transformed economics: training runs that would have taken months shrank to days, making the current generative AI wave viable.

Today, GPUs are treated as a sovereign-grade strategic asset. Export restrictions. National stockpiles. Trillion-dollar market valuations. All of it traces back to the requirement that video games look good at sixty frames per second.

Game Engines: The Operating System for the Physical World

Unreal Engine and Unity started as tools for making games. They are now the infrastructure for industries that have nothing to do with games.

The reason is straightforward. Game engines solve extremely hard problems: real-time 3D rendering, physics simulation, lighting, networked state synchronization across thousands of concurrent users. Solving those problems at the performance level games demand creates tools that are simply better than anything a traditional enterprise would build for its own use case.

Film is the most visible example. The Mandalorian and The Batman replaced green screens with massive LED walls driven by Unreal Engine, rendering photorealistic parallax-correct backgrounds in real time. Post-production timelines that previously ran six to twelve months are now concurrent with filming. The virtual production market is growing at nearly 15% annually and is projected to exceed $11 billion by 2034.

Automotive is deeper. BMW and Tesla use game engines to design and prototype the digital dashboards their drivers see every day. More than half of virtual vehicle showrooms run on gaming engines. Aerodynamic simulations, ergonomic walkthroughs, HMI prototyping — all in game engines, all eliminating costly physical models before a single part is manufactured.

The most important application is robotics training. Synthetic data — artificially generated environments where every object, light source, and physical property is labeled and controllable — is now the primary solution to the data gap in physical AI. NVIDIA’s Isaac Sim, built on gaming libraries, allows developers to train robots in procedurally generated environments that simulate rare conditions impossible to capture in the physical world: extreme weather, mechanical edge cases, unusual human behaviors. The technique is called domain randomization. Game developers invented it to create visual variety. Roboticists use it to harden AI against the messiness of reality.

Virtual Economies: The Original Fintech Lab

Before anyone used the word fintech, games were running the world’s most sophisticated digital economies.

World of Warcraft and EVE Online pioneered digital scarcity, virtual currency management, and player-to-player marketplaces in the early 2000s. Game developers became, in effect, digital central bankers — managing inflation and deflation through carefully calibrated faucets (how currency enters the economy) and sinks (how it leaves). The Real Money Trade phenomenon proved that virtual labor could be reliably converted to fiat currency, establishing the foundational thesis that digital assets hold intrinsic value based on the effort required to acquire them.

This is not ancient history. The $1.5 billion creator economy on platforms like Roblox and Fortnite runs on these same mechanics. NFTs, tokenomics, burn mechanisms, decentralized exchanges — each has a direct predecessor in MMORPG design. The Roblox creator economy, Fortnite’s engagement payout pool, the IP Partner Licensing Program — these are all refinements of systems game designers built decades ago because they had no choice but to figure out how digital economies work.

What’s significant is the social dimension. On Discord alone, 41% of digital purchases are now gifted, and 25% of gift buyers are non-players engaging purely through social networks. The economy of game worlds no longer lives inside the game. It has migrated into the broader digital social fabric, taking the mechanics with it.

Behavioral Design: The Science of Human Engagement

The most underestimated technology transfer from gaming is not hardware or software. It is the science of what makes human beings do things.

Game designers spent decades solving the hardest problem in behavioral science: how do you get a person to voluntarily persist through difficulty, return day after day, and find meaning in structured challenge? The frameworks they developed — flow states, self-determination theory, variable reward schedules, social accountability systems — are now deployed across healthcare, education, finance, and enterprise software.

The results are quantifiable. Gamified health protocols have achieved medication compliance rates above 90%, significantly outperforming standard care. Surgeons trained in VR simulation built on game engines demonstrate training confidence improvements of 275% compared to traditional methods. Gamified learning platforms have demonstrated 60% improvements in information retention. Employee retention in organizations using gamified HR systems runs 69% higher.

Duolingo’s streak mechanic. Peloton’s leaderboard. Nike Run Club’s badge system. Apple Watch’s ring closure. These are all game design. The companies that built them understood something the rest of the business world is still catching up to: engagement is not a marketing problem. It is a design problem. And the people who know how to solve design problems at this level are game designers.

Human Understanding: The Psychological Dimension

All of the above — hardware, simulation, economies, behavioral mechanics — depends on one foundational input: understanding what human beings actually want, fear, value, and respond to.

This is where Solsten enters the picture.

Solsten built its proprietary psychological database by doing what no research firm had done before: interfacing directly with real players, in real gaming environments, at scale. Gaming creates uniquely honest conditions for psychological research. Players are not in a survey. They are not performing for a researcher. They are making thousands of micro-decisions under varying conditions of reward, frustration, competition, and collaboration. The behavioral signal is extraordinarily rich - and uncovering the psychology means uncovering the driver behind the behavior.

The result is a dataset that captures the psychological architecture of real human beings — their core motivations, values, and decision-making patterns — with a fidelity that traditional market research cannot approach. Not because the technology is different, but because the environment is. Gaming strips away the social performance layer that distorts every focus group and survey. People reveal who they are when they play.

That psychological database now powers decisions far beyond gaming. Understanding that a consumer is motivated by autonomy rather than status changes everything about how you design a product, price it, market it, and retain the person who bought it. Solsten’s data — built in gaming, applicable everywhere — is the human understanding layer that sits beneath every other technology on this list.

What Decision Makers Need to Understand

The Niantic story is not a curiosity. It is a template.

Gaming has always functioned as the world’s most efficient technology incubator, because the environment demands real solutions at scale. The cost of failure is a bad review. The reward for success is hundreds of millions of engaged users generating data no other industry can produce.

Every foundational technology on this list — GPUs, simulation engines, economic systems, behavioral design, psychological modeling — was built in gaming because gaming was the only environment demanding and tolerant enough to develop it.

The companies that understood this extracted enormous value. The ones that wrote gaming off as entertainment watched the infrastructure of the modern economy get built by people playing video games.

The next wave is being built right now. Spatial computing, physical AI, synthetic data at scale, real-time world models, humanization of AI. All of it is happening first in gaming.

The question is whether you’ll be paying attention this time.

Technically Entertaining covers the intersection of gaming, technology, and business strategy. If this post made you think differently about an industry you thought you understood, subscribe today and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Subscribe now